Labor activist Mary Beth Maxwell has emerged as a serious candidate for Secretary of Labor, Democratic and transition offiicials confirm. The Wall Street Journal reported this morning that Maxwell, who’d be the first openly gay cabinet secretary, is being vetted for the job, along with Jennifer Granholm of Michigan and Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas. Of the three, Sebelius has the inside track and the closest relationship with Obama. Sebelius has also been mentioned as a potential pick for Secretary of Education.

Obama got some guff for choosing Janet Napolitano for DHS, from Democrats who were worried that her departure would mean one-party rule for Arizona. I disagreed, thinking that either the Democratic party is strong in Arizona or it isn’t. You can’t rely on one person’s magic powers to take care of you.

If he picks Sebelius, though, I may have to rethink that assessment. How many red-state Democratic governors does he really want to pick off?

I’d go one further and say that runaway executive compensation is not one of the pressing problems facing the auto industry, either. And yet that seems to be one of Congress’s genius “strings” that they’re going to attach to any bailout plan.

All that said, I completely agree with Ben McConnell’s take:

If they were very smart, the CEOs would drive unreleased, next-generation cars that get 100 MPG. They’d stop in a half-dozen towns along the way and invite a newspaper editorial board writer to ride shotgun for a dozen miles. They’d update their status on Twitter. They’d write a few posts for the company blog. They’d shoot video on a Flip camera and talk about how they screwed up at their first appearance, how they’re selling their fleet of corporate jets, and their plans for the future. If they behave like real people instead of CEO machines, they might arrive in D.C. backed by some pretty good word of mouth.

Set aside the issues of driving on highways in cars that aren’t street legal; I think this is the right idea. The Big 3 are cutting back on traditional advertising right now, it’s a perfect time to think about low-cost, effective word-of-mouth campaigns. GM’s has a blog, they ought to use it. It’s time to rebuild their relationship with their customers — flesh-and-blood customers, the U.S. taxpayer is not a sufficient proxy.

Now, in all fairness, GM has come up with a plan (PDF). It’s aggressive, but probably not aggressive enough. They’re proposing shrinking their dealer network down from 6500 to 4700. I’ve read analysts say they need to go down to about 1500 dealers (!) to be viable. They’re also looking at shuttering several brands, which is smart.

Also, Alan Mullaly, Ford’s CEO, seems to get it, as I’ve written before. So you can’t lump these three companies all in together. Chrysler, on the other hand, is totally screwed.

Left out of the $2.6 million commitment is SAM’s rental agreement with Washington Mutual. SAM financed its 2007 expansion in downtown Seattle by sharing space with the bank. The museum’s tax forms indicate it receives $4.6 million annually in rental fees from WaMu. SAM’s annual budget is $24 million.

SAM’s public profile on the issue is close to invisible. No one at the museum would talk about it Monday, but spokeswoman Nicole Griffith has said repeatedly the museum hopes JPMorgan Chase will honor the lease agreement.

Links Mentioned: A timeline of the Mumbai carnage … SAM and WaMu … some early warning signs of trouble at the Seattle bank … Obama’s new Labor secretary?

At the household level, the look of want is different today than during the last prolonged downturn. The government helps the unemployed and the poor with programs that didn’t exist when the Great Depression hit - unemployment insurance, Medicaid, food stamps, Social Security for seniors. Beyond that, two of the basics of existence - food and clothing - are a lot cheaper today, thanks to industrial agriculture and overseas labor. The average middle-class man in the late 1920s, according to the writer and cultural critic Virginia Postrel, could afford just six outfits, and his wife nine - by comparison, the average woman today has seven pairs of jeans alone. So we’re less likely to see one of the iconic images of the Great Depression: Formerly middle-class workers in threadbare clothes lining up for free food.

If we look closely, however, we might see more former lawyers wearing knockoffs, doing their back-to-school shopping at Target or Wal-Mart rather than Banana Republic and Abercrombie & Fitch. Lean times might kill off much of the taboo around buying hand-me-downs, and with modern distribution networks - and a push from the reduce-reuse-recycle mind-set of environmentalism - we might see the development of nationwide used-clothing chains.

Am I the only one who wants to abbreviate this organization as PAD-THAI?

Do you think her husband will get freaked out when she leaves the house every morning for work and says, “Honey, I’m going into labor!”

Links Mentioned: Romney on the bailout … Sorkin on Chapter 11 for GM

I was expecting to read about the rise of executive power in the Bush Years, which would probably have covered Gitmo, secret prisons, the Iraq War, etc., etc. And there was some of that, to be sure. But the article was actually about something else, something that’s been on my mind a lot lately, the rise of parliamentary-style democracy in America. Instead of a system where the branches of government check each other, we’re moving slowly towards a system where the branches coordinate when they’re held by the same party, and the parties oppose each other. This is a telling anecdote:

When [LBJ] was elevated to the vice presidency in 1961, he suggested to Senator Mike Mansfield, his successor as Senate majority leader, that he be permitted to continue presiding over the Democratic caucus. Mansfield initially agreed — but the rest of the caucus revolted. The vice president might be the ceremonial president of the Senate, they argued, but to empower him to attend their caucuses, let alone run them, would create a dangerous precedent.

By contrast, in recent years, you could set your watch by the arrival of Vice President Cheney’s motorcade on Capitol Hill for the Republican caucus’s weekly strategy sessions. He was at times known to bring Karl Rove with him as well. “You can imagine the amount of dissent that goes on with the two of them sitting there,” Leahy told me.

I have mixed feelings about the rise of parliamentary politics in America. In general I think it’s a bad thing, but it’s also sort of inevitable with the rise of the party system.

But what I really wanted to know, and what the article completely avoids (perhaps because it was likely written before the election), is whether or not any of that changes in an Obama administration, and why. Obama will have a relatively sizeable Democratic majority in both houses to work with. Will Joe Biden and Rahm Emmanuel show up on Capitol Hill for strategy sessions? I think the fact that Obama is filling his staff with congressional heavy-hitters (Emmanuel, Daschle, Schiliro) speaks volumes on this score. On the other hand, the Democrats are by nature more of a coalition, as the Prof once wrote, so the coordination will probably be less intense (cue Will Rogers quote).

At any rate, the dynamic between Obama and the Democratic congress will be fun to watch.

[A] “counterintuitive” finding is more interesting, and thus more likely to get published, than an intuitive one. But maybe lots of our intuitive ideas are correct and the “counterinuitive” selection bias is obscuring that. Certainly this is a problem in punditry and (especially) magazine writing, where the key to getting a lot of column inches is to have an interesting idea rather than a true one.

Sullivan, we’re gunning for you . . .

Conceptually Contrarian jumping-off point: The absurd resurrection and reevaluation of Jean-Claude Van Damme’s career.

What’s So Special About a Team of Rivals?

What’s the Value of a Big Bonus?

What’s the Point of Daylight Time?

The black-white Oughts (both George W. Bush’s us-versus-them and the opposition’s are-you-f-ing-kidding-me response to it) will give way to a decade of contrarianism, where everything you know is wrong (and in some cases will be used to give Obama some ideological cover).

In al-Qaida’s first response to Obama’s victory, al-Zawahri .,.. called the president-elect—along with secretaries of state Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice—”house negroes.”

Speaking in Arabic, al-Zawahri uses the term “abeed al-beit,” which literally translates as “house slaves.” But al-Qaida supplied English subtitles of his speech that included the translation as “house negroes.”

Proving that they’ve learned nothing about how NOT to destroy social capital from their adversary George W. Bush during the last seven years of struggle, Al-Qaida manages to alienate just about everything but the rocks with this one. 

And yet again it’s interesting to note how closely the rhetoric of the American right mirrors that of religious radicals everywhere.  Much like Americans who think Bush and Palin would be a dream ticket, al-Zawahri either doesn’t grasp the historical significance of Obama’s election, or feels completely threatened by it.

Detroit needs a turnaround, not a check.

Actually, the title of piece says it all –

Let Detroit Go Bankrupt

If this weren’t an op-ed, I might blame the editor for the attention-grabbing headline. But this must certainly be Mitt’s own work. Re: that presidency thing, thanks for playing, Mitt.

In all seriousness, I still haven’t made up my mind if I support a Detroit bailout or not. Assuming the companies are eligible for restructuring under Chapter 11, I agree with Romney that tough love is in the long-term best interest of the American auto industry and its workforce. But if it must be Chapter 7 (an idea which — upon reflection — seems more and more ludicrous to me), then it’s a different story.

Citigroup is not the only bank grappling with tremendous losses. Many financial institutions are hiking customer fees at record levels.

It may be quick and easy, but that ATM convenience is going to cost you. Citibank, Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo are all starting to charge non-customers as much as $3 per transaction to use their machines.

“I think it’s kind of ridiculous because everybody is going through economic hardships,” New Yorker said Margo Waltz said.

. . .

Several banks are also boosting minimum account balance requirements and experts warn this is just the beginning as banks merge or go belly-up.

“The fewer banks you have the fewer choices consumers have the more a sort of gotcha the banks have,” Ludwig said.

One alternative experts are suggesting is checking out your local credit union.

“They’re not going to gouge their members because their members are the people who run the credit union,” Ludwig said.

States currently control interest rates, which are practically unlimited. Consumer advocates are calling on the Federal Reserve to step in as they did after the 1989 savings and loan bailout. They want interest rates and fees capped.

It’s estimated banks collected $17 billion in overdraft fees last year alone.