Today in The Wall Street Journal, Eleanor Laise and Kelly Green report that many companies that suspended 401(k) contributions during teh depths of the financial crisis have yet to restore them–despite a return to “surging profits and rising dividends.” Among the companies named in the article: FedEx, which last week boosted its profit expectations for the year to $4.60 to $5.20 a share, up from $4.40 to $5 previously, but said it is taking roughly two years to fully restore the employer matching contributions it cut in February 2009; United Parcel Service Inc. raised its dividend more than 4% earlier this year but still hasn’t restored the 401(k) match it suspended in early 2009; and Honeywell, Honeywell International Inc., whose second-quarter earnings were flat compared with a year earlier, which has no plans to restre the 50% cut it imposed last year. “All told, almost one in five U.S. companies with at least 1,000 workers have reduced or suspended their matching contributions since September 2008. Roughly half have yet to restore those benefits,” the article reports. “If anything, more cuts may be on the way. One in 10 employers as of February planned to reduce or eliminate matches within the next 12 months, according to a survey by the Society for Human Resource Management released in late June.” The crazy thing is, as Daniel Gross writes in Slate, “corporate America is sitting on $1.8 trillion in cash, and the business sector’s balance sheets are in rude health.” Sounds like just the sort of thing that could contribute to the deflation trap that Paul Krugman has been warning us about.

Three years to the day that he hit his 500th home run, Alex Rodriguez, breaking a 12-day, 47 at-bat homerless drought, hit his 600th home run in a 5-1 Yankee victory over Toronto, becoming only the 7th man to reach that milestone. SI.com’s Joe Sheehan thinks it’s inevitable that Rodriguez will one day hold the all-time record now possessed by Barry Bonds. “Rodriguez’s early start leaves him plenty of room to decline, as well as to suffer the minor injuries that often chip away at an older player’s at-bats, and still chase down Bonds with room to spare.” Below is Sheehan’s “very conservative estimate” of the remainder of A-Rod’s career, beginning with the rest of 2010, showing Year, Projected Number of Plate Appearances, and Projected Home Runs. “If this path were to hold,” predicts Sheehan, “Rodriguez would hit his 763rd home run early in the the 2018 season.” He would be 43 years.

2010 220 12
2011 595 31
2012 561 27
2013 526 24
2014 508 21
2015 455 19
2016 430 15
2017 397 13
2018 323 11
2019 211 6

Rep. Anthony Weiner in The New York Times: “While I appreciate the concern over the future of civility in politics, I believe a little raw anger right now is justified. Democrats make a mistake by pretending there is a bipartisan spirit in Congress these days, and would be better served by calling out Republican shams.

“The specifics of the debate last week should be an example of an issue beyond partisan dispute. The bill in question was created to help the thousands of citizens who went to ground zero after the Sept. 11 attacks. These are Americans who wanted to help, and who scientific studies now show are falling ill and dying in troubling numbers. . . .Though it should have been a legislative slam dunk, the bill was defeated on a simple up-or-down vote, with only 12 Republicans voting in favor. . . .

“It was frustrating to hear Republicans say these people didn’t deserve more help because, as one put it, “people get killed all the time.” Others called it another big entitlement program. Some said it was a giveaway to New York, or complained that the bill would have been paid for by closing a tax loophole. We responded to each of these arguments over the summer in the hours of hearings and markups of the bill. . . .There were also Republican objections that we put the bill on the “suspension calendar,” which is generally used for noncontroversial legislation. . . .What upset me most last week were comments voiced by Republicans who claimed to be supporters of the bill, yet who used their time on the House floor not to persuade skeptical Republican colleagues to vote yes but to excoriate Democrats for using the suspension calendar. . . .

“And I got angry. I didn’t break decorum, but I did say what I was thinking and feeling. . . . Instead of engaging in a real debate about how to address the challenges we face, Republicans have turned to obstruction, no matter the issue, and then cry foul after the fact. They claim to want an open legislative process with more consultation and debate, but the truth is they simply don’t want to pass anything. Meanwhile, conservative television and talk radio programs are full of false anger, intended to scare Americans. I think some genuine frustration at this misleading tactic is overdue. That’s why I got mad last week.”

My latest assignment has me working for Mr. Joe Plumeri, the chairman and CEO of the Willis Company. Have you ever heard of Willis? Neither had I, until this relationship began. Turns out Willis is a venerable British insurance company, now approximately 175 years old. Mr. Plumeri is an astute and charismatic businessman from the wilds of Trenton, New Jersey. He brought me over to London for three days to absorb what I could by attending a group of town hall meetings Joe would be conducting with Willis’ employees.

Day One passed like a whirlwind. Arriving around noon at the splendid Willis Building, located on Lime Street opposite the really ugly Lloyd’s of London building and near the wonderful Gherkin, I got a quick tour of the premises, including a visit to the rooftop and the splendid view it affords.  After that, I did my best to stay out of the way of the folks in the Communications Department, who had their hands full without babysitting a guest. Later, however, I got to sit in with two sessions with Joe, during which he explained that the company’s earnings were especially impressive given the hardships the difficult economic climate imposed. In the evening,  I had a great time. Josh King and Nick Balamaci and I went to dinner at La Pont de la Tour, a terrific restaurant located on Bankside just east of the Tower Bridge. They are a couple of smart and witty fellows, and we had a great time after dinner, crossing Tower Bridge and examining the husk of the venerable, amazing, now abandoned Willis Building on Trinity Square, before retiring to our rooms at Willis House.

The next day I attended two more town hall sessions. I suppose the experience must be something like Dead Heads used to be able to go through, when they could compare concerts, and savor how Jerry Garcia would play a solo during Sugar Magnolia at one show but save it for Truckin’ at another. Relieved of duty at around 3:30, I headed back to Bankside and the Tate Modern, which was having an exhibition called Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera. There were at lot of incredible photos on display, including images by Walker Evans, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Garry Winogrand, Robert Frank and Weegie. But the exhibit was intellectually flabby. The cohering idea, as articulated by the curator, Sandra S. Phillips, in a filmed introduction, was that these were images taken by “the invasive eye,” but that seems to be a notion at once flabby and liquid. In what way is Abraham Zapruder‘s film of John F. Kennedy assassination invasive? How is a picture of a person riding a public subway invasive? Voyeurism seems obviously invasive, but when a nude person poses for the camera, as many, many subjects in this exhibition did, does their exhibitionism not change the level of voyeurism? A lot of questions seem to revolve around an idea of rights that the exhibition did not explore; for example, does not the notion of `invasive’ change when a person falls into the territory of news. A lot of the time I was thinking that it wasn’t the camera or the taking of the photograph that was invasive, but the construct of art, the freezing of the moment to invite interpretation, that was the invasive act. Plus the surveillance portion of the show was a drag and provoked no ideas of interest. Still, it was cool to see the pix. After that, I tramped back to Willis House, stopping off for a bite under an old covered mall called Leadenhall Market, dating from the mid-19th century, where a bar band was playing sixties songs and patrons were dancing in the street.  Hearing These Boots Were Made for Walking and especially Don’t You Just Know It put me in a particularly cheerful mood.

On Saturday I got up early and did the public tour of The Palace of Westminister, also known as Parliament. It was fabulous; if there was a downside, it was the crisp 75 minute tour did not permit lingering, and man, if anything deserved lingering, it was the incredible art that hangs in the joint. Most breathtaking were the two giant (45′ x 12′) frescoes in the Royal Gallery by Daniel Maclise, The Death of Nelson and The Meeting of Wellington and Blücher. The heroic paintings are just brilliant, but tragically, humidity from the Thames caused the colors to deteriorate, and now the pictures are almost monochrome. It was a great treat to stand on the backbench of the government’s side in Parliament. After that, I hiked down down Millbank for a about a mile to the Tate Britain, to see a merry exhibit called Rude Brittania, which showcased Britian’s splendid satirical and comic artists. I was delighted to see work by William Hogarth, the great Regency satirists Thomas Rowlandson and my main man James Gillray, the Victorian George Cruikshank, Ralph Steadman and the great Gerald Scarfe. I got a particular kick seeing the hilarious puppet of Margaret Thatcher that was used on Splitting Images. The exhibit was great fun, and after that I wandered around the rest of the museum for a while and absorbed a nice fat blast of culture. Then it was back to the airport and into the clutches of American Airlines, for a long, cramped, punishing eight hour flight home, whose tortures were relived only by a very pleasant chat with my seat mate, a young schoolteacher from Rockland, Illinois, named Sara, who was returning home from a month in Spain–a month that included the once-in-a-lifetime night she spent in Saville watching Las Rojas capture La Copa Mondial, and joining he celebration that followed. What a night that must have been!

There was a set of astonishing statistics in the New York Post today, in an article by Michael Snyder:

According to a 2009 poll, 61% of Americans “always or usually” live paycheck to paycheck, up from 43% in 2007.

43% of Americans have less than $10,000 saved up for retirement. 36% of Americans say that they don’t contribute anything to retirement savings. 24% of American workers say that they have postponed their planned retirement age in the past year.

According to Harvard Magazine, 66% of the income growth between 2001 and 2007 went to the top 1% of all Americans. An analysis of income tax data by the Congressional Budget Office found that the top 1% of US households own nearly twice as much of America’s corporate wealth as they did just 15 years ago.

Only the top 5% of households have earned enough additional income to match the rise in housing costs since 1975.

For the first time in US history, banks own a greater share of residential housing net worth in the United States than all individual Americans put together.

In 1950, the ratio of the average executive’s paycheck to the average worker’s paycheck was about 30 to 1. Since the year 2000, that ratio has exploded to between 300 to 500 to one.

As of 2007, the bottom 80% of American households held about 7% of the liquid financial assets.

The bottom 40% of income earners now collectively own less than 1% of the nation’s wealth.

Average Wall Street bonuses for 2009 were up 17% when compared with 2008.

The average time needed to find a job has risen to a record 35.2 weeks.

More than 40% of Americans who are employed now work in often low-paying service jobs.

More than 40 million Americans are on food stamps.

The number of millionaires in the US rose a whopping 16% to 7.8 million in 2009, despite the financial crisis.

About 21% of all children are living below the poverty line in 2010 — the highest rate in 20 years.

The top 10% percent of Americans now take in approximately 50% of the income.

Or more properly, the man of the year is Paul, the character Mark Rufalo plays in the The Kids Are All Right, the perceptive, wise, winning new film co-written and directed by Lisa Cholodenko. The reason is simple: there hasn’t been a male character like Paul in the movies in, like, forever.

The Kids Are All Right is about a long-married lesbian couple, Nic and Jules, played by Annette Bening and Julianne Moore, and their two teenage children, Joni, played by Mia Wasikowska, who is about to head off to college, and Laser, played by Josh Hutcherson, who is basically a fine young man who has some questions. Joni and Laser are half-sibs: one was born of Nic, the other of Jules, but both were the result of an anonymous contribution made at a sperm bank. Laser persuades his sister to find out the identity of the donor, who turns out to be the laid-back hipster Paul.

For a couple of decades now, Hollywood has not known what to do with male sexual energy. Time and again, it is sublimated, repressed, channeled, tamed, punished, mocked, ignored, or agonized over. In this movie, it is celebrated. Paul is the life-giver, even apart from his relationship to Laser and Joni. He has a farm on which he brings life from the ground; he is an entrepreneur who owns a restaurant where he feeds people. Right from the moment we meet him we are shown that women find him attractive and enjoy him as a lover. As the movie progresses, we see him in other roles: he is the one who coaxes a song from the lips of the taut, controlling Nic (and in Joni Mitchell’s Blue, a perfect match of song and the character’s better, largely forgotten self); who revives passion and confidence in the neglected and underappreciated Jules; who encourages the simmering Joni to assert herself, even as he casts a fatherly cloak (or, literally, a hat) of protection over her; and who provides a model of cool masculinity for the searching Laser, who amid his female-surrounded surroundings, has latched onto a highly inappropriate role model for guidance. It is true that Paul is, as Nic correctly observes, “a bit full of himself” ( a fairly forgivable fault in the cock of the walk) and is no intellectual. But he is vibrant, interesting, considerate and ultimately decent. And never in the film is he required to punch anyone or pull a gun.

He is, unfortunately, disruptive. That is, of course, the ironic underside of creativity. The life-giver is the destroyer, and Paul instigates a disorderly rebelliousness in Joni and almost breaks up Nic and Jules’ stable marriage. This near-demolition is not entirely of Paul’s making; if there weren’t already tinder, Paul probably wouldn’t have been able to start a blaze.  Cholodenko and her co-writer Stuart Blumberg do a fair and unsentimental job of showing the problems that gradually emerge within a marriage and a family–Julianne Moore’s splendid speech near the end of the film is a description both unsparing and generous–and there is little wonder that the freedom offered by the Unattached Male is such a threat to a way of life that demands such discipline and sacrifice. What’s fascinating is that the film doesn’t give us a Paul who is selfish and self-absorbed; as the movie progresses, he begins to conclude that despite the creativity he offers and the joy he both gives and takes, his greater fulfillment awaits his entrance into the deeper commitment of marriage and family. That would leave him with a big question–can he remain the man he is in an institution that requires him to give so much of himself away? But that’s a topic for a different movie. Right now, at a moment when an eminent magazine like The Atlantic can publish with a straight face a bit of silly provocation called “The End of Men’‘, The Kids Are All Right gives us the great gift of Paul, the very model of modern masculinity.

I voted for Barack Obama for president. Today, I still like the guy, still admire him, have high hopes for him, and believe he could do a great job. But the truth is, when I had to choose between him and Hilary Clinton in the New York primary, I voted for Hilary. Why? Experience. I understand that neither of them had all that much time in the Senate, but I don’t think a person spends eight years living in the White House with the president of the United States, plus all those years in the Governor’s mansion in Little Rock, without learning a lot about governing

At this point, it’s hard to give Obama a grade. He did the impossible and passed the impassable bill–health care reform–but it did not include a public option. He passed a stimulus package that stopped the recession from getting worse but that wasn’t enough to turn the thing around; economically speaking, he violated the sacred Colin Powell rule, and did not enter with overwhelming force. He’s waging a war in Afghanistan for ill-defined objectives and without a defined constituency. He got a financial reform bill passed, but it doesn’t include the Volcker Rule, and perhaps even more damaging, has not become an instrument that has enabled to claim the narrative of the financial crisis. Instead, he has allowed the administration to be portrayed as incompetent, and even worse, hostage to the party’s exhausted response, big government deficit spending. And then he keeps getting slapped with problems unexpected and odd–the oil spill, the Shirley Sherrod mess.  “There is something loose and jittery about the atmosphere round Obama at the moment of which [Agriculture Secretary] Vilsack‘s clumsy over-reaction gives us a whiff,” writes Tina Brown in The Daily Beast. “ It’s as if inside the White House the belief in Obama’s inspirational charisma is still such that every time the ugliness of brute politics intrudes, it’s a startling revelation. The president’s cerebral goals aren’t supposed to be jostled by the coarse irrelevance of media bandits and ideological saboteurs. Except they are. Maybe recognition of this fact is what made Bill Clinton, at almost the same moment in his first mid-term elections in 1994, shove aside purists on his team like George Stephanopoulos and return to his devilish former consigliere, Dick Morris. Clinton knew he had to fight fire with fire, or sleaze with sleaze, that was more deft, more cunning.”

Or, in the stinging schoolyard  words of Sarah Palin, “How’s that hopey-changey thing working out for ya?”

I don’t think the second President Clinton–we could call her 44–would have been so cerebral. I’m pretty sure the Clinton playbook is pretty Chicago school (“If he sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue”) and it’s applied to friends as well as foes. Somehow I don’t think a Clinton operation would have allowed Martha Coakley to run such a passive, brain-dead campaign that cost the Democrats an important Senate vote. I don’t think the White House would have been so above the fray and allowed Republicans such a wide-open free-fire zone.  I certainly don’t think the old “It’s the economy, stupid” gang would have failed to take ownership of the economy. This isn’t to say everything would have been better. I’m inclined to think 44 might not even have attempted health care reform, and I don’t really think she’d have pulled us out of Afghanistan because if Bambi has something to prove about his ability to wage war, a woman would have as much if not more.

But most of all, 44 would have shaken things up, just as Brown advises. If somebody wants to demonstrate to  me that Rahm Emmanuel, David Axelrod and Valerie Jarrett are doing a good job, I’d like to see the proof; in the meantime, I’d start looking for the Republican James Baker, the smoothest White House chief of staff of my life. (On the other hand, Hillary’s campaign staff kind of sucked, particularly the brainy but not brilliant strategist Mark Penn.) I’m afraid Robert Gibbs’s soft-spoken whine needs to go; he’s not forceful, and he counterpunches poorly. Where have you gone, Mike McCurry?

Time to retool and refuel: at this time in his presidency, Clinton began shedding (in one way or another) not only Stephanopoulos, but also  Dee Dee Myers, Bernie Nussbaum, Lloyd Benstsen, Les Aspin, Mack McLarty, and adding people like David Gergen, Lloyd Cutler, McCurry, and the indispensable Leon Panetta. If I were Obama, I’d move heaven and earth to convince ardent Hillary supporter  Ed Rendell to leave his cushy job governing the Keystone State and come serve as White House Chief of Staff.

Coming to the end of the second year of the Obama presidency, what is sadly apparent is that one of the most gifted politicians of my lifetime–gifted intellectually, gifted rhetorically–has completely failed to articulate the narrative of our times. It’s perplexing, but he has never explained chapter and verse how and why we have found ourselves mired in this economic situation full of debt, unemployment and uncertainty. He lost the narrative on his stimulus bill, he lost the narrative on health care reform, and he he lost the narrative on Wall Street reform. As such, he has been chewed up by his opponents, who have presented a garbled mass of half-truths and insinuations to undermine him. And although he is surrounded by excelelnt economic thinkers, none of them–not Timothy Geithner, not Paul Volcker, not Larry Summers–has been able to help the president recapture the narrative.

That’s why the president needs Elizabeth Warren, the chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel of the Troubled Assets Relief Program. A forceful advocate of greater accountability and transparency, Warren has spent the two years of the crisis clearly, cogently and concisely explaining to the American what’s gone wrong, and what needs to be done. Sometime soon, the president will appoint a director to run the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection, an agency Warren has done much to envision and midwife into existence. But there is a storm brewing behind the scenes. As ABC’s Jake Tapper reports, sources say Treasury Secretary Geithner “has concerns about her appointment”–I think that means “opposes”– given some of the pointed criticisms Warren has made about the Obama administration’s policies.

• In Warren’s April 13 report on Treasury’s $75 billion foreclosure prevention program, she wrote that “Treasury’s programs are not keeping pace with the foreclosure crisis. Treasury is still struggling to get its foreclosure programs off the ground as the crisis continues unabated.”
• In her May 13 report on Treasury’s attempts to help small businesses, she wrote that “Because small businesses play such a critical role in the American economy, there is little doubt that they must be a part of any sustainable recovery. It remains unclear, however, whether Treasury’s programs can or will play a major role in putting small businesses on the path to growth.”
• In her June 10 report on Treasury’s AIG bailout, she wrote, “The government argues that AIG’s failure would have resulted in chaos, so that a wholesale rescue was the only viable choice. The Panel rejects this all-or-nothing reasoning. There is no doubt that orchestrating a private rescue in whole or in part would have been a difficult – perhaps impossible – task, and the effort might have met great resistance from other financial institutions that would have been called on to participate. But if the effort had succeeded, the impact on market confidence would have been extraordinary and the savings to taxpayers would have been immense.”

“Warren,” Tapper writes, “has been an aggressive watchdog over the Treasury Department and, more personally, a tough questioner of him in oversight hearings, for instance asking why shareholders and officials with US automakers had to make severe sacrifices to continue while recipients of TARP funds have made millions; or pushing Geithner to explain why AIG counterparties such as Goldman Sachs were paid 100 cents on the dollar.”

I can’t say that Geithner’s policies have been wrong; indeed, they mostly seem quite prudent. But He seems very much to be a Bank Man, meaning that he sees the interests of the big, powerful banks as one and the same as the interests of America. And goodness, we’re all adults here, maybe that’s right. But Geithner is not helping the president win the popular argument. The presence of Warren should help the administration win the policy fight, and even if she doesn’t change a single one of Geithner’s policies, it should force him to explain himself better. She is a talent and an asset and a force, and the president needs her on his team.

Before George Lois went to work at Esquire and became a giant of the magazine industry, he was a giant of the advertising industry. Thus it makes sense that for its August issue, Playboy would turn to Lois for some comments on Mad Men, which begins its fourth season on Sunday. Now, this does not mark Lois’s first opinions on the series; he’s spoken about it before, and he doesn’t like it. He thinks it shortchanges ethnics, the Jews and Italians (and Greeks, like Lois) who were transforming the industry with audacious and creative campaigns. He is also sore that the show shortchanges art directors (of which he is among the most brilliant) in favor of copywriters. “Mad Men has given the world the perception that the scatology of the Sterling Cooper workplace was industry wide. In theor advertising, the show’s creators have the balls to proclaim that “Mad Men explores the Golden Age of advertising,” but surely they know that they are shoveling shit. Their show is nothing more than soap opera set in a glamorous office where stylish fools hump their appreciative, coiffured secretaries, suck up their martinis, and smoke themselves to death as they produce dumb, lifeless advertising. . . .The more I think and wrote about Mad Men, the more I take the show as a personal insult. So fuck you, Mad Men, you phony gray-flannel-suit, amle chauvinist, no-talent, WASP, white-shirted, racist, anti-Semitic Republican SOBs.”

Well, far be it from me to take issue with one of my heroes. And with a genius. And with a guy man who on the scene while I was literally in short pants. Still, I think Lois is taking the show entirely too personally. For one thing, all those years that he was involved in making ads that ran on Bonanza, did he think, “Yes, this is it, this is exactly what cowboy life was really like.” When his ads ran on that earlier show that involved an advertising agency, Bewitched, did he say, “Boy, you have to admire the documentary qualities of this show about a suburban witch.”  The truth is, Mad Men is brilliant not because it is about advertising, or even about the sixties. It’s about us–about people who are so sure of everything who are in the process of discovering that everything they’re sure of is falling apart. That in a nutshell was the experience of the sixties, and it has been the hugely uncomfortable experience of the last two years. I’m sorry, Mr. Lois, you’re looking at the show through the wrong side of the lens. How Mad Men handles the facts is irrelevant; its vision is brilliant.