PoliticsEgypt: Prez Mubarak: Fires cabinet, "tomorrow there will be a new one"

Yahoo! News [Jan29,2k11]

by Jailian Zayan

Mubarak defiant 

as Egypt toll rises, 

Obama wades in

CAIRO (AFP) – Egypt's embattled President Hosni Mubarak on Saturday addressed the nation for the first time since deadly protests erupted against his regime, vowing reform but showing no sign of relaxing his decades-old grip on power.

US President Barack Obama meanwhile called on Egyptian authorities not to use violence against the raging political protests, and drove home his message in a 30-minute phone call with Mubarak.

Four days after angry protesters first took to the street and with at least 27 people killed in subsequent street battles, a stoney-faced Mubarak said he had sacked the government and would pursue economic and political reforms.

"I have asked the government to resign and tomorrow there will be a new government," Mubarak, 82, said on state television as protests raged in Cairo and other cities despite a night-time curfew.

"We will not backtrack on reforms. We will continue with new steps which will ensure the independence of the judiciary and its rulings, and more freedom for citizens," he said.

Protesters who have been demanding Mubarak step down, as well as an end to endemic state corruption and police brutality that have become systematic under his rule, dismissed the speech as too little, too late.

"We don't care if the government resigns, we want him to resign," said demonstrator Khaled, 22, in the Mediterranean port city of Alexandria.

Student Abdo, 20, said: "Prices are still high, the problems are still there, this doesn't solve anything."

Thirteen people died in clashes with police on Friday in the canal city of Suez, at least five in Cairo and two in Mansura, north of the capital, with many fatalities caused by rubber-coated bullets, medics and witnesses said.

Seven more people died on Wednesday and Thursday.

Key allies including the United States, Britain and Germany on Friday expressed concern about the violence, with Britain noting that the protesters had "legitimate grievances."

EconomicsUSA: Prez picks war profiteer: Jeffrey Immelt GE brisk biz in Iran while Yanks killed

huffington post   [jan21,2k11]

Obama Picks Jeffrey Immelt, GE CEO, 

To Run New Jobs-Focused Panel 

As GE Sends Jobs Overseas, 

Pays Little In Taxes

First Posted: 01/21/11 11:59 PM Updated: 01/21/11 11:59 PM

Jeffrey R. Immelt, the chairman and chief executive of General Electric Co. tapped by President Barack Obama as his next top outside economic adviser, will be asked to guide the White House as it attempts to jump-start lackluster job creation and spur a muddled recovery. 

Immelt's firm stands as Exhibit A of a successful and profitable corporate America standing at the forefront of the recovery. It also represents the archetypal company that's hoarding cash, sending jobs overseas, relying on taxpayer bailouts and paying less taxes than envisioned.

The move is the latest salvo in the White House's continued aggressive and very public outreach to corporate America. Earlier this month, Obama appointed a top executive at JPMorgan Chase as his chief of staff, and this week he granted a longtime wish of business interests by promising to review federal regulations perceived as onerous.

Immelt's appointment raises fresh questions about Obama's courtship and future policy proposals. Firms like GE say good jobs will come from lower taxes and less regulation. Immelt told analysts Friday that he'll focus on tax policy and regulation, among other topics.

"A clear problem in the recovery is that it's been a much stronger recovery for business in terms of their profit and earnings than for those folks who work and earn a living in the U.S.," said Gary Burtless, a former Labor Department economist and now a fellow at the Brookings Institution, a research and policy organization in Washington.

Burtless said Immelt was likely hired to reassure corporate America. Political opponents have cast the Obama administration as unfriendly to business interests, and the administration has had difficulty rebutting that theme. Immelt's hiring was yet another step in that direction.

"It's a significant piece of outreach to the business community," said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office and top economic adviser to Sen. John McCain's 2008 presidential campaign. The appointment could mean business has a "genuine liaison" at the White House, Holtz-Eakin said.

"Business folks will trust an Immelt much more than an academic or a politician with academic experience," said Burtless.

Whether GE's chief executive should represent the White House in those discussions, though, is another matter. He will continue to serve atop GE while advising the Obama administration.

The corporate chieftain's experience running GE, one of the world's biggest companies, may shed light on the kinds of recommendations he'd make behind closed doors.

The company is sitting on $79 billion in cash, tops worldwide among non-financial publicly-traded companies, according to a Jan. 10 note by analysts at Standard and Poor's. In fact, GE's cash holdings are about 62 percent more than the next company, Toyota Motor Corp.

"We feel good about that," Immelt said in noting the "flexibility" the surplus cash gives the firm. GE generated a $11.6 billion profit last year, a six percent increase from the previous year.

Non-financial corporations sit atop a record $1.9 trillion in liquid assets, according to the Federal Reserve. Relative to their short-term liabilities, U.S. corporations haven't been this flush with cash since 1956. The administration has been critical of corporate cash-hoarding.

GE's improving fortunes reflect the general trend in corporate America. In the quarter ending Sept. 30, corporate profits reached an all-time high of $1.66 trillion on an annual basis, according to the Commerce Department.

Yet nearly one in ten American workers is jobless. The unemployment rate has been stuck above nine percent for 20 consecutive months, the longest such streak since records began in 1948, according to the Labor Department. When Barack Obama took office, joblessness stood at 7.8 percent.

 
-- EconoMix

Why is Obama advancing a known dealer with enemy? 

boots in baghdad [may8,2k08]

THURSDAY, MAY 08, 2008

General Electric and Iran: CEO Jeffrey Immelt is killing American troops in Iraq

General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt admits General Electric is doing business with Iran.

Iran has been sending platter charge improvisational explosive devices, also known as Explosively Formed Penetrators, into Iraq that have been maiming and killing American soldiers and marines since I was there in 2005. They have also made continuing and substantial fiscal contributions in support of anti-American and anti-Iraqi forces.

"It is the policy of the Iranian government, approved to the highest levels of that government, to facilitate the killing of American's in Iraq." - CIA Director General Michael Hayden

Despite such realities, one of America's largest and most respected corporations continues to do business with Iran. Some business even relates to defense technologies.

At GE's annual meeting in Pennsylvania on April 23, 2008, GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt was questioned by a shareholder on GE's involvement with Iran:

Investor: GE products are keeping Mr. Ahmadinejad comfy when he's plotting to kill U.S. troops and trying to annihilate Israel. It's just an outrage. And GE is keeping their infrastructure intact... You know, this is kind of blood money and I don't want to be a part of it...

Jeffrey Immelt: Ok let me respond, and I'll respond on behalf of the board. We have stopped taking any orders from Iran in 2005. Our customers with Iran were European oil and gas companies. We decided at that time to fulfill the orders they had committed to us at the time and now that is completed...

Investor: I hope the other shareholders will vote. Do they think we should be selling equipment to Iran? Let's see a show of hands...

Jeffrey Immelt: Dr. Borelli, you've gone on and on, I think you made your point. Thank you.

Mr. Immelt's statement is misleading, considering General Electric is still in business with Iran.

Article III Section 3 of the United States Constitution states, "Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or, in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort."

PoliticsUSA: Calendar: mark February 6, O'Reilly/Obama Super Bowl Sunday interview

YouTubeService,  yUT2ube, video partner of refWrite


-- Owlb

Liturgics: Memorial Service: Tucson, Arizona address by prez Obama is historical text

 a few of
my thawts on the wonderful/terrible memorial service
for the assassinated, including a member of Congress and a judge and a child and .....

mass-murder on the micro-scale ....

To review the event in Tucson, Arizona, i much experienced viewing the full TVcast as tho a church service:

The early prayer in the memorial service had some heart-touching elements for me [like pervasive use of the word 'Creator,' with reverence], but it wasn't coherently representative of native peoples at prayer, in my experience .... still he did mention in his story of personal witness that on one side of his family they're all Mexican, while on the other side, his family was Yaqui native tribal people who had been driven out of Mexico and found refuge in the USA; Mexico yes, Mexico no; he was proud to be an American, I felt.  But regarding his liturgy, with the great eagle's feather, held forth [a powerful symbolism of the metaphor-rich eagle, to say nothing of the eagle-narratives; yet. I'm sure some medicine men / medicine women who watched their protege, him, on TV -- he mentioned that he had asked the medicine people for permission to come and say a prayer of creation -- they granted permission and  were all watching him on TV all the while wincing at the liturgically scattered 'prayer' --  that prayer was also a statement of values to his audience [sermonette] and sometimes a rambling which is off-putting to most non-anthropologists, I'd guess [i'm no anthrplgist either]. Still, he gave presence in that 'prayer' to the holy Great Spirit. An opening liturgical moment that was for me at once disconcerting but overall inspiring, edifying, reverencing me.

Then came the parade of politicians tasked with the liturgics of reading the passages of Scriptures from the Hebrew Bible / Old Testament [cabinet secretary Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano];  i think she read from Isaiah.  then from the new Testament [cabinet secretary, Attorney General Eric Holder, a passage in 2 Corinthians].

This strong thread spoke powerfully to my heart in seeking to enter more deeply into the mourning for our loss, the families' losses, the civic loss of office-bearers and citizens, the grassroots of the public order in America.

Arizona's Governor,  Jan Brewer,  i found her brief address also inspiring.

Another blogger, Conor Williams, goes off the diving board at the deep end of the pool in his entry, 'Barack Obama, Abraham Lincoln, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Creativity' [ Jan13,2k11]  --

 I watched the President’s speech in Arizona last night with a fair measure of pessimism. Facing the highest of expectations after half a week of intensive, overheated public debate (fueled by an ever-quickening news cycle), the President seemed sure to disappoint. No one could match the hype for this speech.

Of course, if you watched the speech last night, you know that I was wrong. In the vein of the best of the American political tradition, the President stepped up and moved beyond politics—transcendent in the only meaningful sense of the word. For such an effort, only Lincoln’s words will do: President Obama called us to be great, to live up to “the better angels of our nature.” 

i'm very grateful for this good president in his address to the mourners and responsible citizens in the audience.  it was an audience; and i disliked it intensely.

The audience was so rude, cheerleading-behaviours dominated the soundscape and the camera as much as they coud; enthusiasm yes, politesse yes.  Ceremonial degradation, no!

The audience was terrible; the liturgists were splendid. The President had the position of preacher, the function of homilist; and he gave a fine oration on civility, to say the least.  And his christianly sermonic themes and threads, made the developing public memorial service in Tucson more Christian than not.  And splendidly so.  A mass assembly of Americans in Tucson is going to attract attention -- if, as i hope and pray, it can get past the ACLU.


But a more properly political-aspectual analysis woud be focussed on the good-hearted idiot-student corps rah-rahing their way thru the ceremony, like drunken sailors, as tho they had no idea what a death and a murder and an assassination mean.  They came to chearlead for their political idol of the season.  What a confusion of decora -- a lay Christian-mostly service of mourning, the sermon / address, having been themed around 'civility,'  considering the problem of Evil for a key moment, the President taking his text for this sermon from a verse in The Boof of  Job [pronounced 'jobe', ], and a myopic too-old-to-remain-childish display of cheerleading.


i think the address was historical, and will appear in all the textbooks of political discourse in this period. he will be compared to all sorts of earlier presidents in part on the basis of his addresses, this one perhaps will become the most famous.


Attraction and repulsion --


--  Politicarp

PoliticsUSA: Polls: WSJ offers a credible report on Fed electoral trends re upcoming Nov 2

Wall Street Journal's reporter / analyst Jonathan Weisman gives us the poop on the current state of play (as of October 14-18:  note that a spread of 5 days for an opinion survey in the USA skewers the result; it's bad polling, but in this case nevertheless probably the best around).  I saw the Fox News' commentator Liberal millionaire leftist Alan Coomes just poo-poo any poll that doesn't reflect his own predilections, claiming that the Republicans lead only in "battleground states," whereas everywhere else his Democrats are leading and will prevail, the extreme leftist maintains. Maybe he's correct about the current trend, just two weeks before most voters get out to the polling places.

However, the battleground state of Ohio puts the lie to the ministrations of the Coomes hypothesis.  It went for Obama by a huge majority, it's an industrial state suffering for some years from radical de-industrialization  and unbearably h+ unemployment.  Obama has abandoned his role as Prez to spend weeks out of office (but I doubt he'll return a proper proporation of his pay cheque), campaigning for the re-election of congressional Democrats, especially in Ohio.  There Obama has to mobilize his Black and student base.

His playing of the race card becomes even more glaring in the neiboring state of Pennsylvania, where he spends his second most campaign t+m this round, drumming up Black voters, especially in Philadelphia.  Philadelphia has a notoriously unscrupulous Democratic Party history in elections, and in Obama's first national campaign the Philly voting was bedevilled with violent threats by the Black Panther Party, wielding baseball bats and positioning its demented minions close to the doors of polling places to intimidate Whites from casting their ballots within -- all of which the Attorney General of the USA, Eric Holder, has refused to prosecute because the videotaped vote-corruptors are Black, by his own statement, as reported by a Fed prosecutor in the inJustice Department.  Only Whites cawt in similar activities woud face the strong arm of the law, according to the whistleblowing gov lawyer.

I'm sure the Panthers have learned their lesson, and will be much more stealthy in this round since Holder has given them a carte blanche, so the pantheroids won't want to embarass their Attorney General again.

The WSJ/NBC joint poll is worth reading if you're at all interested in the trends in American opinion surveys among potential voters.  Read and go figure for yourself, I urge.

-- Politicarp