WASHINGTON – Today, President Barack Obama announced his intent to nominate the following individuals to key Administration posts:

• Bill Baer – Assistant Attorney General for the Antitrust Division, Department of Justice
• Marcilynn A. Burke – Assistant Secretary for Land and Minerals Management, Department of the Interior
• Joseph Jordan – Administrator for Federal Procurement Policy, Office of Management and Budget
• John Norris – Commissioner, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission
• Heidi Shyu – Assistant Secretary of the Army for Acquisition, Logistics, and Technology, Department of Defense

The President also announced his intent to appoint the following individuals to key Administration posts:

• Milton Irvin – Member, President's Board of Advisors on Historically Black Colleges and Universities
• George B. Walker, Jr. – Member, President's Board of Advisors on Historically Black Colleges and Universities

President Obama said, “I am proud that such experienced and committed individuals have agreed to serve the American people in these important roles.  I look forward to working with them in the months and years ahead.”

President Obama announced his intent to nominate the following individuals to key Administration posts:

Bill Baer, Nominee for Assistant Attorney General for the Antitrust Division, Department of Justice
Bill Baer is the chair of the Antitrust Practice Group at Arnold and Porter LLP.  He joined Arnold and Porter in 1980, becoming a partner at the firm in 1983.   In his practice, Mr. Baer represents a broad range of companies in U.S. and international cartel investigations, mergers and acquisition reviews, and in antitrust litigation.   From 1995 to 1999, he served as the Director for the Bureau of Competition at the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).  Mr. Baer began his legal career in 1975 as a trial attorney for the Bureau of Consumer Protection at the FTC.  Mr. Baer holds a B.A. from Lawrence University and a J.D. from Stanford Law School.

Marcilynn A. Burke, Nominee for Assistant Secretary for Land and Minerals Management, Department of the Interior
Marcilynn A. Burke has served as Acting Assistant Secretary for Land and Minerals Management at the Department of the Interior (DOI) since July 2011 and as Deputy Director of the Bureau of Land Management since August 2009.   Prior to serving in these positions at DOI, Ms. Burke was a tenured Associate Professor of Law at the University of Houston Law Center where she taught natural resources, land use management, environmental, and property law.  Before she began her teaching career, Ms. Burke was an associate at the law firm of Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen, & Hamilton.  She earned her A.B. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and her J.D. from Yale University.

Joseph Jordan, Nominee for Administrator for Federal Procurement Policy, Office of Management and Budget
Joseph Jordan is currently Senior Advisor to Office of Management and Budget Acting Director Jeffrey Zients, a position he has held since December 2011. Between 2009 and 2011, Mr. Jordan served as Associate Administrator for Government Contracting and Business Development at the Small Business Administration (SBA). Prior to joining SBA, Mr. Jordan was an Engagement Manager with McKinsey & Company, a global management consulting firm.  At McKinsey, he specialized in developing purchasing and supply management strategies for clients across several industries. He also worked with the firm’s public sector practice, advising state governments on how to cut costs and capture efficiencies.   In 2000, Mr. Jordan helped build and manage operations of Backwire, a web-based publisher-marketer. When the company was purchased by Leap Wireless, he transitioned to become Leap’s project manager for strategic planning and product development. From 1998 to 2000, Mr. Jordan worked as an Associate Producer on MSNBC’s Hardball with Chris Matthews.  Mr. Jordan received his B.A. from The College of the Holy Cross and an M.B.A. from the University of Virginia's Darden School of Business Administration.

John Norris, Nominee for Commissioner, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission
John Norris is a Commissioner at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), a position he has held since December 2009.  Over the past 10 years, Mr. Norris has also been involved in numerous local, regional, and national energy related boards and organizations.  Before his appointment to FERC, he was Chief of Staff at the U.S. Department of Agriculture.  From 2005 to 2009, Mr. Norris served as Chairman of the Iowa Utilities Board (IUB).   Prior to joining IUB, he served as Chief of Staff and Energy Advisor to Governor Tom Vilsack, Chief of Staff to U.S. Representative Leonard Boswell, and owned and managed a restaurant in Greenfield, Iowa.  Mr. Norris received a B.A. in Political Science from Simpson College and a J.D. from the University of Iowa College of Law.

Heidi Shyu, Nominee for Assistant Secretary of the Army for Acquisition, Logistics, and Technology, Department of Defense
Heidi Shyu has served as Acting Assistant Secretary of the Army for Acquisition, Logistics, and Technology (ALT) since June 2011, and as Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for ALT since November 2010.  Prior to joining the Administration, Ms. Shyu worked for the Raytheon Company from 1997 to 2010.  During that time, she held several leadership positions including Vice President of Technology Strategy for Space and Airborne Systems (2009-2010), Corporate Vice President of Technology and Research (2007-2009), Vice President and Technical Director for Space and Airborne Systems (2004-2007), and Vice President of Unmanned and Reconnaissance Systems (2002-2003).   Prior to working at Raytheon, Ms. Shyu worked for Hughes Aircraft Company (1992-1997), Litton (1990-1991), and Grumman Aerospace (1989-1990).  She began her career in 1978 as an Engineer for Hughes Aircraft Company.  Ms. Shyu holds a B.S. from University of New Brunswick in Canada, an M.S. from the University of Toronto, and an M.S.E.E. from University of California, Los Angeles.

President Obama also announced his intent to appoint the following individuals to key Administration posts:

Milton Irvin, Appointee for Member, President's Board of Advisors on Historically Black Colleges and Universities
Milton Irvin is currently Chair of the Advisory Board for Castle Oak Securities, L.P.  In January 2012, Mr. Irvin retired from UBS AG where he had been a Managing Director and the Americas’ Head of Diversity and Inclusion since 2002.  Before working at UBS, Mr. Irvin served as President and COO of Imbot.com, from 2000 to 2002, and Blaylock & Partners L.P., from 1998 to 1999.  Mr. Irvin began his career as a corporate lending officer at Chase Manhattan Bank, and then spent 20 years at Salomon Brothers, holding numerous positions including Managing Director and Head of Generalist Sales.  Mr. Irvin currently serves on the Wharton Graduate Advisory Board, the Board of the Harlem School of the Arts, and LEAD, a non-profit that unites colleges and universities with corporations to encourage minority high school students to explore careers in business, science, engineering, and technology.  In 1994, President Clinton appointed Mr. Irvin to the Advisory Committee of the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation for which he served as chairman from 1995 to 1997.  Mr. Irvin earned his B.S. from the United States Merchant Marine Academy and his M.B.A. from the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania.

The Reverend George B. Walker, Jr., Appointee for Member, President's Board of Advisors on Historically Black Colleges and Universities
The Reverend George B. Walker, Jr. is the Vice President of Strategic Partnerships at the Gay & Lesbian Victory Fund and Victory Institute (“Victory”), a position he has held since October 2011. From 2008 to 2011, Reverend Walker was the Vice President of Leadership Initiatives at Victory.  Before joining Victory, Reverend Walker worked at the American Constitution Society for Law and Policy as the Development Director from 2006 to 2008; the Human Rights Campaign as Major Gifts Officer from 2004 to 2006; and the Center for Community Change, where he was Deputy Operations Director from 2003 to 2004 and Director of Evaluation from 2001 to 2003.  From 1994 to 1996, Reverend Walker worked as a volunteer for the U.S. Peace Corps.  He later served as Associate Director of the Peace Development Fund from 1998 to 2001.  Reverend Walker is the recipient of the U.S. Peace Corps’ Franklin H. Williams Award, the German Marshall Memorial Fellowship, and the Pipeline Project’s 21st Century Leadership Fellowship.  Reverend Walker holds a B.A. from Morehouse College and an M.Div. from the Divinity School at Duke University.

White House.gov Press Office Feed

MEMORANDUM FOR THE SECRETARY OF STATE

SUBJECT: Delegation of Authority Pursuant to Sections 110(d)(4) and 110(f) of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000, as Amended

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, including section 301 of title 3, United States Code, I hereby delegate to you the authority conferred upon the President by the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000 (Division A of Public Law 106-386), as amended (the "Act"), to determine, consistent with sections 110(d)(4) and 110(f) of the Act, with respect to Burma for fiscal year 2012, that assistance described in section 110(d)(1)(B) of the Act would promote the purposes of the Act or is otherwise in the national interest of the United States.

You are authorized and directed to publish this memorandum in the Federal Register.

BARACK OBAMA

White House.gov Press Office Feed

Think about the America within our reach…an America that attracts a new generation of high-tech manufacturing and high-paying jobs…we have a huge opportunity, at this moment, to bring manufacturing back.

Last weekend, the New York Times ran a long and important piece on why one particular high-tech product, Apple’s iPhone, is manufactured in Asia and not the United States. The article is part of a renewed debate about how the United States can reinvigorate its manufacturing sector, or whether it even should.

A key part of the article is that there is a dearth of middle-income jobs in U.S. manufacturing. A combination of labor-saving technological improvements and the off shoring of more labor-intensive manufacturing has led to a sharp reduction in factory jobs that were once a pathway to the middle class for many Americans. Manufacturing employment on the factory floor may simply never reach levels of previous decades.

Nevertheless, as we have written previously, advanced manufacturing remains critical to U.S. prosperity in the 21st century for three key reasons:

• Advanced manufacturing drives productivity and innovation. Two-thirds of R&D investment occurs in industry and manufacturing is a core component of the nation’s innovation ecosystem that is key to creating new technological industries.
• Advanced manufacturing generates output and employment throughout the economy. It has the largest economic multipliers of any industry and large manufacturing facilities sustain entire communities. Even if manufacturing never supports as many direct jobs on the factory floor as it has in the past, restoring advanced manufacturing is thus essential to America’s long-term employment challenges.
• Manufacturing is critical to improve the nation’s trade balance and tackling our 0 billion cumulative trade deficit. Manufactured goods still comprise 57% of U.S. exports and closing the trade deficit will be difficult, if not impossible, without manufacturing playing a key role.

So there is a strong rationale for renewed government efforts to help strengthen this vital sector of the economy, but how?

The fact is that global manufacturing has fundamentally and irreversibly changed in recent decades in ways that has altered the structure of national economies. In essence, the production system has become globally fragmented. In a new paper on this subject, economist Richard Baldwin calls this globalization’s “second unbundling.”

The “first unbundling” occurred with the introduction of steam power, which led to a sharp reduction in shipping costs. Production was no longer tethered to local consumption; factories could produce for internal markets that could now be reached by rail or foreign markets by steamships. Yet production was still local. It tended to cluster within factories and in industrial districts, both to increase the scale of production and to coordinate closely with other actors within a particular industry.

The “second unbundling” occurred with the rapid advance and diffusion of information and communications technologies, beginning in the mid 1980′s and accelerating in the late 90′s, which led to an unprecedented reduction in coordination costs both within and across national economies. For the first time, it became economical not just to geographically separate consumption from production but separate different stages of the production process. Today, coordination is still necessary for production, but that coordination has become increasingly internationalized into global supply chains with key components being produced in regional networks.

Apple’s production process epitomizes this transformation. As the New York Times story notes, the iPhone is designed in the United States, but includes semiconductors manufactured in Germany and Japan, memory from Korea and Japan, display panels and circuitry from Korea and Taiwan, chips from Europe, and rare metals from Africa and Asia. The final device is assembled in China. All told, just 10 percent of iPhone components are manufactured in the United States.

It’s important to note that it’s not simply lower labor costs that are behind the iPhone story:

It isn’t just that workers are cheaper abroad. Rather, Apple’s executives believe the vast scale of overseas factories as well as the flexibility, diligence and industrial skills of foreign workers have so outpaced their American counterparts that “Made in the U.S.A.” is no longer a viable option for most Apple products.

Just as important is that China, Japan, Korea and Taiwan are part of a competitive regional electronics supply chain cluster that is self-reinforcing. As Ryan Avent writes, “After some level of Asian development and integration, it became more attractive for manufacturers to locate there as more manufacturers located there.” Manufacturing firms are sustained by operating within a cluster of related firms and suppliers and drawing on pools of specialized labor and other resources. This phenomenon is known as “economies of agglomeration,” and it is an increasingly important feature of the 21st century global economy.

Despite the era of globalization, geography still matters — just in new ways. Even as supply chains have globalized, proximity has retained an importance in manufacturing. This is particularly true for just-in-time manufacturing, where businesses seek to reduce inventory and waste and improve productivity by closely balancing the supply chain with product demand. If changes are made to the product design, proximity is important to reduce time lags in production. The rise of just-in-time production therefore means that the time it takes to ship supplies and components to assembly can be a much more important factor than the dollar costs of shipment itself.

This means that it would likely be difficult to bring manufacturing of key iPhone components back to the to the United States. Many of the key components of the supply chain — memory, consumer electronics batteries, flat screens, even semiconductors — have been progressively or completely off shored, and economies of agglomeration have taken over. So “bringing these jobs back,” as President Obama says, would take more than simply closing the labor cost gap through either lower wages or higher productivity in U.S. manufacturing. It would also require a long effort to build our own regional manufacturing agglomerations around key components here in the United States, and that could prove costly.

Instead, a better strategy is to indentify the industries where we still have supply chain component ecosystems, particularly those at the higher end of the value chain, where policy and targeted investments can help retain and expand our competitive edge. We should also indentify emerging technology industries that have the potential to be a source of high growth, and ask what we can do to build new industry agglomerations and foster the commercialization and competitive production of those technologies in the United States.

We don’t need to look far for recent examples of this strategy in action. The bailout of America’s auto companies has been maligned as overreaching “industrial policy,” but the logic of the move was clear. If GM and Chrysler had gone bankrupt, the entire industrial ecosystem and supply chain that supported the automakers in the United States would have collapsed, creating not just massive unemployment but also undermining America’s future auto production capacity. Once lost, the network of parts suppliers could have been gone for good. From this perspective, the auto bailout efforts worked. As the President noted in his State of the Union, GM is again the world’s top automaker, Chrysler is rebounding fast, and the auto industry added 160,000 jobs since the end of 2009.

The Obama Administration’s investments in advanced battery technology for vehicles are an example of forward-looking policy to build an ecosystem in an industry that is in its early stages. It took .4 billion in stimulus grants to 48 different companies, but the Administration’s efforts have helped to build a critical mass of advanced battery manufacturers, many of them clustered across Michigan and the American rust belt. Here, they may become a critical contributor to a globally competitive advanced vehicle production cluster, including the factories of the retooled “Big Three” automakers.

In this effort to identify key manufacturing opportunities, we also need to determine which industries are particularly important to sustaining a broader high-tech innovation ecosystem. Harvard Business School professors Willy Shih and Carl Pisano have made a persuasive case that a hollowing out of some high-tech supply chains in the Unites States have harmed the nation’s ability to innovate and produce next-generation technologies. The consequences of losing these supply chains thus means more than losing the jobs of today; it could mean losing entire industries of tomorrow.

The new reality of global supply chains requires a new debate about manufacturing in the United States, one that recognizes that manufacturing has irreversibly changed, yet has become even more essential to sustaining American prosperity in the 21st century. The president is right to stake much of his vision for America’s economic future on renewed American leadership in advanced manufacturing. But realizing that vision will require new strategies and new thinking.

For more reading, see “Manufacturing Growth: Advanced Manufacturing and the Future of American Prosperity,” by Breakthrough Institute and Third Way

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To find out which will be the top dividend stocks in 2012 for cash payouts, we looked back to see which dividend paying stocks paid out the most cash in dividends in 2011. This year’s group are all large cap Dow dividend stocks, which is logical, since market cap is an important part of this equation.

These 5 stocks paid out from over billion to billion-plus in 2011, and appear likely to increase those amounts in 2012, given their historic and recent dividend growth rates. (Even though GE lowered its dividends in 2009, it began increasing them again in 2010):

click to enlarge

Upcoming Dividends: All of these stocks pay quarterly dividends, and 3 of them are listed in our High Dividend Stocks By Sectors Tables. The projected dividends listed below are based upon the most recent quarterly payout:

Except for GE, these stocks were rewarded by investors

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Double Dividend Stocks – Seeking Alpha