HKS in the News April 5, 2012

1. Don’t let bin Laden family become martyrs (Kayyem) Boston Globe

2. Wall Street Examines Fine Print in a Bill for Start-Ups (Glauber) New York Times

3. Euro Zone Cuts Deeper Amid Criticism (Summers) Wall Street Journal

4. Working Conditions at Apple’s Overseas Factories (Ruggie) New York Times

5. Getting fired an occupational hazard for town managers (Luberoff) Boston Globe

6. The GI Bill is back, helping thousands of veterans (Adams) CNNMoney.com

Don’t let bin Laden family become martyrs

Boston Globe

April 5

Commentary by: Juliette Kayyem

Topic: The arrest of Osama bin Laden’s wives in Pakistan

THIS WEEK, a Pakistani court sentenced the three widows of terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden to 45 days in prison for immigration offenses. It may seem mild, insulting, even shameful to his many victims worldwide. But the long-term benefits are immeasurable. The bin Laden clan should not be made into figures of sympathy, forced to serve endless prison sentences. They may carry his name, but they cannot be allowed to carry his legacy of martyrdom.

Simply, the family must be made irrelevant. The movement their patriarch led is in search of inspiration and influence. His widows and children are ideal magnets to help unify the tattered forces of Al Qaeda. The best attitude now toward this whole lot is one big yawn. It will take a large dose of magnanimity, but it is worth it.

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Wall Street Examines Fine Print in a Bill for Start-Ups

New York Times

April 4

Quoted: Robert Glauber

Topic: Ramifications of the JOBS Act

Wall Street is examining whether it will benefit from a little-known section of a broad new law that President Obama is expected to sign on Thursday.

Provisions tucked into the so-called JOBS Act, or the Jumpstart Our Business Startups, will roll back some major securities regulations and parts of a landmark legal settlement struck almost a decade ago. That 2003 settlement built a Chinese wall between Wall Street research analysts and investment bankers, an effort to prevent analysts from improperly promoting stocks to help their firms drum up business from corporate clients….

Robert Glauber , former head of the National Association of Securities Dealers, the precursor agency to Finra, and a lecturer at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, says the 2003 accord was a “legal settlement” and a legislative modification is “perfectly appropriate.”

“A sweeping prohibition of certain behavior never made sense,” he said. “Easing the restrictions for a select group of companies will give us a chance to see if it provides useful information to the marketplace without investor abuse. The key is to make sure the banker-analyst relationship is properly disclosed and that the S.E.C. carefully monitors the effects of the change.”

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Euro Zone Cuts Deeper Amid Criticism

Wall Street Journal

April 3

Research by: Lawrence Summers, Center for Business and Government

Topic: Fiscal policy during a recession

The IMF and others have long argued that austerity hurts growth, at least in the near term. Now a growing number of economists say that for many countries, austerity isn't an effective way of balancing the budget in the longer term….

Brad DeLong, an economics professor at University of California, Berkeley, has researched the effects of fiscal policy together with former U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers.

Their finding: In a depressed economy where interest rates are low, budget cuts that prolong a recession undermine tax revenues, erasing the fiscal benefits of the initial cuts.

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Working Conditions at Apple’s Overseas Factories

New York Times

April 4

Letter to the editor by: John Ruggie, Center for Business and Government

Topic: Apple’s decision to investigate working conditions in Chinese plants

Re “Electronic Giant Vowing Reforms in China Plants” (front page, March 30):

As the author of the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, approved last year, I applaud Apple’s decision to allow the Fair Labor Association to investigate working conditions at Foxconn, its iPhone and iPad supplier in China, and to produce a detailed and credible report.

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Getting fired an occupational hazard for town managers

Boston Globe

April 5

Quoted: David Luberoff, Rappaport Institute

Topic: Job security challenges for town managers

Google the words “town manager fired’’ and you’ll get about 80,000 results, ranging from the bizarre - the Florida manager let go in 2009 for marrying a porn star - to the more mundane stories of disagreements over tactics or personality clashes.

The sheer volume of news points to what officials say is a truism about the top administrative job in any municipality: Getting fired is an occupational hazard….

That may be because town managers and administrators are “the visible side of everything government does locally, and people care deeply at the local level,’’ said David Luberoff, executive director of Harvard University’s Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston. And managers traditionally are not protected by union rules that make it difficult to get rid of other municipal employees, he said.

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The GI Bill is back, helping thousands of veterans

CNNMoney.com

April 5

Quoted: Greg Adams MPA/ID 2013

Topic: Military veterans on the GI bill

NEW YORK (CNN Money) -- A huge wave of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans have returned to the U.S. in recent months, and that's created a surge of applicants for the GI Bill….

Thirty-three-year-old Greg Adams credits the bill with helping him adjust to civilian life after 10 years in the Army, where he did a stint in the Special Forces as well as tours in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Philippines….

"I don't know what I'd be doing without this [program]," he said. "Transitioning right into the work force would be pretty tough."

When he left the military last year, he was a major with a bachelor's degree from West Point. Now he's a graduate student at Harvard University, pursuing a three-year program for two master's degrees, one at the John F. Kennedy School of Government and another at Harvard Business School.

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