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Executive Comp Status Report

Joseph E. Bachelder offers up a status report on CEO pay levels and executive compensation legislative and regulatory developments.

Joe Biden's Bush 43-Like Take on Israel v Iran

Joe Biden on "This Week":

STEPHANOPOULOS: And meanwhile, Prime Minister Netanyahu has made it pretty clear that he agreed with President Obama to give until the end of the year for this whole process of engagement to work. After that, he’s prepared to take matters into his own hands.

Is that the right approach?

BIDEN: Look, Israel can determine for itself as a sovereign nation what’s in their interest and what they decide to do relative to Iran and anyone else.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Whether we agree or not?

BIDEN: Whether we agree or not. They’re entitled to do that. Any sovereign nation is entitled to do that. But there is no pressure from any nation that’s going to alter our behavior as to how to proceed.

Georgetown international law expert Tony Arend opines:

From the perspective of international law, Biden’s comments are actually quite troubling. Under the United Nations Charter, states do not have the unilateral sovereign right to use military force “if they make a determination, that they’re existentially threatened, their survival is threatened by another country.” States have the right to use force in self-defense under Article 51 “if an armed attack occurs.” Most commentators would argue that customary international law recognizes that states can use force in self-defense in advance of an actual armed attack, if such attack is imminent.

By using this formulation, Biden is going well beyond the Charter framework for the use of force. ...

Interestingly enough, Biden’s comments seems to be consistent with the controversial position on preemption articulated by the Bush Administration in the 2002 National Security Strategy. Is that really where the Obama Administration wants to be? I wonder whether others in the Administration will issue a “clarification” of the Vice President’s comments? If not, Biden’s comments may just be yet another indicator that the UN Charter framework for the recourse to force is dead.

It may also be another example of how Obama's foreign policy is less of a change from that of Bush 43 than some expected.

Crazy Minnesotans

First, Jesse Ventura. Now, Al Franken. Out here in California, by way of contrast, we had the good taste to select Ronald Reagan and Arnold Schwarzenegger. The Gipper and The Terminator would whip The Body and Stuart Smalley any day of the week.

Anyway, let's see what the RSU guys think about Al:

Happy Fourth

My grandfather in the 17th Cavalry circa 1918:

Better late than never

Colin Powell wises up:

Colin Powell, one of President Obama's most prominent Republican supporters, expressed concern Friday that the president's ambitious blitz of costly initiatives may be enlarging the size of government and the federal debt too much.

"I'm concerned at the number of programs that are being presented, the bills associated with these programs and the additional government that will be needed to execute them," Mr. Powell said in an excerpt of an interview with CNN's John King, released by the network Friday morning.

Well, duh.

Fantasy Mock Draft # 1

My first mock draft of 2009. A 12 team, PPR, snake draft, 2 RB, 2 WR, one RB/WR flex, 1 QB, 1 TE, ! DST, 1 K league:

10: Larry Fitzgerald, WR

15: Tom Brady, QB

34: Darren McFadden, RB

39: Wes Welker, WR

58: Reggie Bush, RB

63: Santonio Holmes, WR

83: Jerricho Cotchery, WR

87: Kellen Winslow, TE

106: Rashard Mendenhall, RB

111: Vikings DST

130: Joe Flacco, QB

135: Visanthe Shiancoe, TE

154: Ryan Longwell, K

159: Michael Jenkins, WR

178: Peyton Hills, RB

183: Pat White, QB(?)

My RB corps is weak, but in a RBBC era and a PPR league, I might be okay. If Oakland uses McFadden in a Wildcat formation on a regular basis and Bush stays healthy, I'd expect to get enough points out of the RB slot. Brady, Fitzgerald, Welker, and Winslow should give me a ton of passing points. Shiancoe gives me an interesting sleeper at TE. 

The oddities of this draft were the early runs on TEs, DSTs, and Ks. Especially the DSTs. The Vikes were the 7th DST taken, which was okay for me, because I had them 3rd on my board, but I still took them several rounds before I expected.

We need to figure out a way to adapt fantasy rosters to deal with the Wildcat formation. In this league, I'd never start Pat White, but I bet he racks up some decent stats for the Dolphins this season.

Palin's Friday Strategy

Matthew Cooper makes a good (if somewhat obvious) point:

Sarah Palin's stunning announcement that she'd not only decline to seek reelection as Alaska's Governor in 2010 but that she'd resign her term later this month caught everyone by surprise. After all, can you think of another presidential candidate who resigned their office to seek the presidency? Jimmy Carter and Mitt Romney had left their governorships when they sought the White House. Bill Clinton remained as Arkansas governor when he sought the presidency. George McClellan was fired by Lincoln before he ran for the presidency in 1864. The last person I can think of who left government service to run for the presidency was Dwight Eisenhower who gave up his NATO command in the Spring of 1952 and garnered the GOP presidendtial nomination a couple of months later. That's far different from cutting out of elective office 18 months before you're scheduled to leave.
Okay, so why would Palin do this on a Friday before a holday, traditionally a day for dumping bad news? A couple of theories:
... She has more bad news to report. There's something going on with her family again. There's more to come with the state's finance. Whatever. There's no good reason for her to suddenly up and quit the governorship, her one claim on elective experience.

The prospect that there's dirt coming is going to send a lot of people suffering from Palin Obsession Syndrome (yes, I mean you, Andrew, among others) into a major tizzy this weekend. 

Look, maybe if we all give it a rest, Palin will just go away. She's an attention whore and she'll probably wither away if we stop paying attention.

Ten Things I Think I Think

1. The worst thing about Sarah Palin's decision to step down as Governor to focus on running for the presidency is that it'll make Andrew Sullivan even more monomaniacal. Andy: Give it a rest once in a while!

2. Steven Taylor has been doing a great job covering the Honduras coup. I totally defer to him on the merits of this case. But I do think it is possible to have a military coup that intervenes in the democratic process yet still be pro-democracy. Suppose the german military had launched a coup to remove Hitler after he won the post-Reichstag Fire elections so as to prevent the Reichstag from passing the Enabling Act that turned Hitler into a dictator. I'm not saying that's what happened in Honduras, of course.

3. Having a psoas strain sucks.

4. It's been a rough week for celebrities. Of the 4 big deaths, I think I liked Karl Malden best. Although, like most men of a certain age, I once owned that amazing  Farrah poster.

5. Obama makes better use of shills, plants, and other propaganda techniques that any US President in living memory. What's odd is that he needs them, considering the media's still in the tank for him.

6. Someday I'd like to own a fully restored Series 1 Jaguar E-type. Except it also ought to have a decent audio/sat nav system.

7. The outpouring of grief over Michael Jackson's death reminds me of the furor when Princess Diana died. In both cases, I just don't get it. Whose life is so empty that the death of a (seriously flawed) person they never met would touch them so deeply? 

8. I do feel sorry for Jackson's kids. They're going to get fought over by people trying to get their hands on their dad's money. It'll be amazing if they end up remotely normal adults.

9. True confession: English tabloids on the internet are one of my guilty pleasures.

10. California is terminally dysfunctional.

Gun Nuts: Do NOT Watch this Video

I'm sending this one to Glenn and Eugene:

How Would You Balance the California Budget: On-Line Tool

The LA Times has an interactive feature that lets you devise a plan for balancing the California budget with program cuts and tax increases. My solution avoided major tax increases and cuts to education, while slashing much else. See it here.

Best Blogs for ...

The "100 Best Blogs for Those Who Want to Change the World." Now we need the 100 best blkogs for people who think "we do well to abide by precedent and precept and even prejudice, for the great mysterious incorporation of the human race has acquired a prescriptive wisdom far greater than any man’s petty private rationality."

Health Care: Not so Fraught

Paul Krugman thinks that:

The standard competitive market model just doesn’t work for health care: adverse selection and moral hazard are so central to the enterprise that nobody, nobody expects free-market principles to be enough.

Mark Hodak's not impressed:

Whenever I see such nonsense, I have to keep reminding myself that the trade theories for which Krugman won his Nobel Prize were explanatory and predictive. Krugman did not win a prize for mechanism design; he could not have predicted E-bay.

The idea of people bidding for stuff they can’t really see from people that they’ve never met is fraught with adverse selection and moral hazard. Honest sellers could not hope to compete with liars selling competitive products. Honest bidders could not hope to competing with fraudulent bids that may not be honored. Such a market, according to the “standard competitive market model” could never exist.

Except that it does....

Krugman pretends that insurance plans are doomed by the existence of adverse selection and moral hazard. Yet we see thriving markets in insurance products of all sorts, including our huge private market in health insurance. One can argue their imperfections, and perhaps blame them on the “free market,” although a free market does not exist for most insurance products, least of all health insurance. But widely-used, competitive insurance products can clearly exist without government–something that ordinary people might one day forget some decades after our health care has become socialized. ...

Even real-world markets, unlike the straw man “free market” that Krugman attacks, deal with adverse selection and moral hazard in insuring for every conceivable risk. Mechanisms like deductibles or co-insurance go a long way toward rationalizing insurance economics. Other mechanisms could certainly be developed if the insurance markets weren’t so regulated as to severely curtail such innovation. Why does Krugman suppose that “free markets” cannot evolve more elaborate mechanisms? More importantly, why does he suppose that the government mechanisms will be any more efficient?

The simple fact is that we don't know what a free market in health care and health insurance would look like, because we've never had one. Since the 1940s, tax policies -- i.e., health benefits are deductible to the employer and not taxable income to the employee -- that eviscerated market forces. Consumers simply didn't have to make choices about health care that they had to make about everything else.

There's a very simple solution to all this. Mandate that individuals buy catastrophic health care insurance. Subsidize those who can't afford it. Let people save for health care costs using tax-advantaged individual health care savings accounts. Let people who want to buy more comprehensive policies do so, but using after tax dollars. Let employers who want to provide more comprehensive group plans do so, but using after tax dollars. Then let's see whether the market is really fraught with adverse selection and moral hazard.