What’s going on – News Roundup
Monday Evening News Roundup
President-elect Barack Obama has formally announced his environmental and energy team. I’ve already mentioned Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Chu and Carol Browner. For Secretary of the Interior, he has named Senator Ken Salazar from Colorado. It is also rumored that President-elect Barack Obama will choose Chicago Public School Chief Arne Duncan for Secretary of Education.
The Illinois House has voted 113-0 to begin impeachment proceedings against Governor Rod Blagojevich. Hearings will begin tomorrow morning. I believe that is vital for the citizens of Illinois to send a clear signal that the governor needs to step down. Pressure needs to be placed on the governor from all sides.
Multinational giant, Siemens, has agreed to pay $1.34 billion in fines to the United States and Germany. Siemens is accused of bribing officials all over the world. German prosecutors were able to find records of slush funds and illegal payments. All I know is that it’s nice talking about a company screwing up that’s not American. It seems as if it is always Halliburton or KBR that are screwing up.
A new report documents the multiple failures that have occurred in the rebuilding of Iraq. It appears to me that we simply have a lack of leadership. With President Bush asleep at the wheel, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was left in charge of reconstruction. Donald Rumsfeld had no interest in reconstruction; therefore, it failed.
Bernard Madoff is a legendary Wall Street trader who has now been indicted for defrauding investors of somewhere around $50 billion. Recently, I’ve often mentioned billions and billions of dollars as if I were talking about Monopoly money. Many on Wall Street were playing with real money as if it were really Monopoly money.
More information is coming out about the Mumbai terrorist attack. Increasingly, links to the banned Pakistani terrorist group, Lashkar-e-Taiba, are being discovered.
A grand jury in New Mexico is investigating one of Governor Bill Richardson’s Political Action Committees. (Governor Bill Richardson is Obama’s choice for Secretary of Commerce.) The question surrounds a company called CDR Financial Products and whether they were given government contracts only after having donated $100,000 to several of the governor’s efforts. This could be trouble.
The Federal Reserve is looking into reforming the credit card industry. New regulations could ban credit card companies from changing interest rates and charging exorbitant late fees without giving customers sufficient notice. I say almost any reform of the credit card industry is welcomed.
A huge storm in the Northeast has left approximately 1.2 million people without power. Maybe it’s just me, but it would seem like places that get a significant amount of snow and ice every year would have buried power lines.
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Where’s the Outr
