To put the blame for Nokia’s problems all on the shoulders of Stephen Elop would be absurd, but he came to the company from Microsoft, bet the company’s future on the Windows Phone operating system, and it was a huge disaster. Now with the one-time market leader no longer viable as an independent company it’s being bought by Microsoft and Elop will find himself earning about $25 million in bonuses as part of Nokia contractual arrangements for a change in corporate control.
The first was to stop Mr Elop resigning. He could have resigned because of the change of control and still received the pay-off. “The amendment was made to keep him on board,” Nokia said.
Microsoft is keen to retain Mr Elop because the US group wants him to run the mobile phone unit, and he has been talked about as a favourite to replace Steve Ballmer as Microsoft chief executive. As part of the deal, Microsoft has agreed to cover 70 per cent of Mr Elop’s pay-off, with Nokia paying the remainder.
“They didn’t have to pay it legally. But they also want to ensure he comes and properly integrates the devices and services business,” Nokia said.
The second reason was that his original contract contained a non-compete agreement that included Microsoft among the list of companies that he could not join. That clause had to be altered to allow him to go to Microsoft with the unit when the deal closes, in the first quarter of next year.
The third reason, Nokia says, is to regulate what would happen were the deal to collapse. Nokia says the contract now says he could be reinstated as chief executive but he would give up all his equity awards.
She goes on to argue that the “banking industry needs to develop different fee and service structures designed to accommodate lower income depositors in much the same way banks currently provide VIP treatment to high-net-worth individuals.”
Saying they “need” to fix fees assumes banks want those customers. The point of the fees is to push those customers away so they don’t have to deal with them. So the “need” was “keep these people out of our bank lobbies”. That’s already been fulfilled.
Bloomberg’s gun control groups says they’re not backing off after this week’s drubbing in Colorado. They say they’re eyeing battles in five more states around the country.
I would suggest the way to taking his pro gun control program to a level where it will be successful is to mobilize voters. Liberal candidates are losing in midterms and recalls due to drop in turnout of their base. They are not losing because they don’t have lobbyists or money being thrown at them.
Bloomberg didn’t have that issue in “blue city” New York in “blue state” of New York. It is a big issue in the “purple” districts where the conservative faction of the electorate who vote every election may really believe “Obama’ll and [insert liberal candidate here] take your guns if they have their way”. In addition Fox & Friends is on in every waiting room and lobby and will say (in not so many words): Bloomberg is buying elections to help Obama take away your guns.
Yet that seemed but part of an indescribable drift we’ve watched throughout Obama’s second term. There is, as I’ve opined before, something off, something not quite right in the White House. We have watched immense investments take place this year in, for example, gun control and immigration, even though, especially on the latter, there was never any realistic hope of … anything.
I get the optics, but fundamentally it has felt as though the WH has not itself understood, outside the optics, where it wants to go. It seems lost, waiting (and praying) for little more than the midterms, which could possibly change the Capitol Hill equation–but it’s unwilling to just come and say that, although just coming out and saying that would beat the hell out of all this perceived drift.
Now comes this Syrian debacle, at which even the administration’s allies are either laughing or crying. Obama’s best possible outcome is for Congress to hurriedly vote this turkey of a war authorization down, so he can move on to the higher and far more coherent ground of preventing national ruin and a global financial collapse, courtesy you-know-who.
This is a good question, because Kerry looks like he’s been left out on his own, this whole Syria trail balloon rollout is an awful miscalculation of what the American people are willing to do and how well we remember Iraq War and gun control and immigration reform were all but dead on arrival. Are they really up to this?
In a two-hour meeting of passionate, sharp debate in the Oval Office, he told them that after a frantic week in which he seemed to be rushing toward a military attack on Syria, he wanted to pull back and seek Congressional approval first.
He had several reasons, he told them, including a sense of isolation after the terrible setback in the British Parliament. But the most compelling one may have been that acting alone would undercut him if in the next three years he needed Congressional authority for his next military confrontation in the Middle East, perhaps with Iran.
If he made the decision to strike Syria without Congress now, he said, would he get Congress when he really needed it?
“He can’t make these decisions divorced from the American public and from Congress,” said a senior aide, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the deliberations. “Who knows what we’re going to face in the next three and a half years in the Middle East?”
[…]
Even as he steeled himself for an attack this past week, two advisers said, he nurtured doubts about the political and legal justification for action, given that the United Nations Security Council had refused to bless a military strike that he had not put before Congress. A drumbeat of lawmakers demanding a vote added to the sense that he could be out on a limb.
“I know well we are weary of war,” Mr. Obama said in the Rose Garden on Saturday. “We’ve ended one war in Iraq. We’re ending another in Afghanistan. And the American people have the good sense to know we cannot resolve the underlying conflict in Syria with our military.”
[…]
Mr. Obama’s backing of a NATO air campaign against Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi in 2011 had left a sour taste among many in Congress, particularly rank-and-file members. More than 140 lawmakers, Republicans and Democrats, had signed a letter demanding a vote on Syria.
Moving swiftly in Libya, aides said, was necessary to avert a slaughter of rebels in the eastern city of Benghazi. But that urgency did not exist in this case.
Indeed, Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Mr. Obama that the limited strike he had in mind would be just as effective “in three weeks as in three days,” one official said.
Thanks to UK Parliament and the 140 Democratic and Republican representatives that signed a letter demanding a vote, many of them recently elected or non-leadership voiced opposition to the President engaging Syria without congressional debate and vote.
The most disconcerting thing is this reaction from his foreign policy team:
Beyond the questions of political legitimacy, aides said, Mr. Obama told them on Friday that he was troubled that authorizing another military action over the heads of Congress would contradict the spirit of his speech last spring in which he attempted to chart a shift in the United States from the perennial war footing of the post-Sept. 11 era.
[…]
The resistance from the group was immediate. The political team worried that Mr. Obama could lose the vote, as Mr. Cameron did, and that it could complicate the White House’s other legislative priorities. The national security team argued that international support for an operation was unlikely to improve.
This surprises me and probably a lot of the American public, but this is inside the beltway conventional wisdom for “both sides”:
Punishing #Syria for using chemical weapons isn’t declaring war. Shouldn’t require Congressional approval. POTUS is our CEO.
That’s the liberal opinion. Waging any sort of war is not an administrative action. It is always a cost proposition. When the US wages war, we will lose money, create destruction, lose American soldiers and foreign innocents and will assume responsibility for post-war stability.
Rep. Peter King says Obama’s decision to go to Congress “undermining the authority of future presidents.” Means it as a bad thing.
The precedent for going to war in this case is the constitution. Peter King has to know that and is arguing really that it’s better for a President to pretend the executive branch has no checks and balances.
Either way, we were too close to waging another war without congressional approval.
