President Obama on Monday will nominate Bob McDonald, a West Point graduate who served as chief executive of Procter & Gamble, to take over as head of the troubled Department of Veterans Affairs, according to White House officials.

The un­or­tho­dox pick of a retired corporate executive whose former company makes iconic household products such as Tide detergent and Charmin toilet paper — rather than a former military general — underscores the serious management problems facing the agency charged with serving more than 8 million veterans a year. On Friday, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Rob Nabors submitted a report to the president finding “significant and chronic system failures” and a “corrosive culture” at the Veterans Health Administration, which has come under fire for record-keeping that was skewed in an effort to cover up the long waits imposed on former troops seeking medical care.

In recent years, the job of VA secretary has been filled by retired generals, medical professionals or politicians. McDonald’s background is a significant departure, though he and his wife have deep family ties to the military. McDonald graduated in the top 2 percent of his class at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., and served in the Army for five years, achieving the rank of captain in the 82nd Airborne Division before taking an entry-level job at P&G. He is the son of an Army Air Corps veteran of World War II, and his wife’s father was shot down over Europe and survived harsh treatment as a prisoner of war.

In a statement, House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio), usually an administration critic, hailed McDonald’s experience as a veteran and as a leader in the private sector, calling him the “kind of person who is capable of implementing the kind of dramatic systemic change that is badly needed and long overdue at the VA. But the next VA secretary can only succeed in implementing that type of change if his boss, the president, first commits to doing whatever it takes to give our veterans the world class health care system they deserve.”


Another Ohio Republican, Sen. Rob Portman, praised Obama for selecting “someone with a wealth of experience managing a complex organization who has also had a distinguished military career.”

McDonald has financially supported Republican politicians in the past, according to federal election records, including Boehner and 2012 presidential nominee Mitt Romney.

McDonald, 61, graduated from West Point in 1975 and is about the same age as most of the senior generals in the Pentagon with whom he would have to work closely in the coming years. Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, graduated from West Point one year before McDonald, and Gen. Ray Odierno, the Army chief of staff, finished up at the academy one year after him. McDonald and acting VA secretary Sloan Gibson, who is expected to serve as his deputy, were West Point classmates.

Newly disclosed documents show that a senior Blackwater employee stymied an investigation into the security contractor’s operations in Iraq by threatening to kill a State Department investigator, The New York Times reported. The documents, which included a memo from Aug. 31, 2007, raised questions about whether increased governmental oversight could have prevented the deaths of 17 Iraqi civilians killed by Blackwater contractors on Sept. 16, 2007, in Nisour Square, Baghdad.

According to the New York Times story, the State Department sent Jean Richter and Donald Thomas, Jr. to Iraq on Aug. 1, 2007, to conduct a monthlong review of Blackwater’s operations in the country. The investigators found a laundry list of wrongdoing by Blackwater, including “overbilling the State Department by manipulating its personnel records, using guards assigned to the State Department contract for other work and falsifying other staffing data on the contract.” They also found evidence of Blackwater contractors “storing automatic weapons and ammunition in their private rooms, where they also were drinking heavily and partying.”

Richter and Thomas concluded that the U.S. Embassy in Iraq was complicit in Blackwater’s malfeasance. The newspaper quoted a memo to senior State Department officials in Washington, in which Richter said, “During and after my stay in Iraq, it has become fully apparent to me that the management structures in place to manage and monitor our...contracts in Iraq have become subservient to the contractor themselves.”
On Aug. 21, 2007, Richter and Thomas Jr., sat across a desk from Daniel Carroll, a project manager for Blackwater in Baghdad. According to Richter, the meeting quickly turned hostile. Richter wrote in the memo that Carroll threatened he “could kill [Richter] at that very moment and no one could or would do anything about it.”

“I took Mr. Carroll’s threat seriously,” Richter was quoted as saying in the memo. “We were in a combat zone where things can happen quite unexpectedly, especially when issues involve potentially negative impacts on a lucrative security contract.”

The New York Times said that in a separate statement, Richter’s State Department colleague corroborated his story.

Mr. Richter was shocked when embassy officials sided with Mr. Carroll and ordered Mr. Richter and Mr. Thomas to leave Iraq immediately, according to the documents. On Aug. 23, Ricardo Colon, the acting regional security officer at the embassy, wrote in an email that Mr. Richter and Mr. Thomas had become “unsustainably disruptive to day-to-day operations and created an unnecessarily hostile environment for a number of contract personnel.” The two men cut short their inquiry and returned to Washington the next day.

jerseyhoya wrote:As for the rights of corporations stuff, only two justices were willing to go so far as to say that people forfeit their rights to bring challenges under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act when they form a corporation, so that part of the decision was not 5-4. People trying to make some money and run a business shouldn't have to forfeit all of their rights. The question of where lines get drawn then is a fair one, but acting like it's preposterous that it gets asked is kind of disconnected from reality.

pacino wrote:Bob McDonald nominated for head of VA:

President Obama on Monday will nominate Bob McDonald, a West Point graduate who served as chief executive of Procter & Gamble, to take over as head of the troubled Department of Veterans Affairs, according to White House officials.

The un­or­tho­dox pick of a retired corporate executive whose former company makes iconic household products such as Tide detergent and Charmin toilet paper — rather than a former military general — underscores the serious management problems facing the agency charged with serving more than 8 million veterans a year. On Friday, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Rob Nabors submitted a report to the president finding “significant and chronic system failures” and a “corrosive culture” at the Veterans Health Administration, which has come under fire for record-keeping that was skewed in an effort to cover up the long waits imposed on former troops seeking medical care.

In recent years, the job of VA secretary has been filled by retired generals, medical professionals or politicians. McDonald’s background is a significant departure, though he and his wife have deep family ties to the military. McDonald graduated in the top 2 percent of his class at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., and served in the Army for five years, achieving the rank of captain in the 82nd Airborne Division before taking an entry-level job at P&G. He is the son of an Army Air Corps veteran of World War II, and his wife’s father was shot down over Europe and survived harsh treatment as a prisoner of war.

In a statement, House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio), usually an administration critic, hailed McDonald’s experience as a veteran and as a leader in the private sector, calling him the “kind of person who is capable of implementing the kind of dramatic systemic change that is badly needed and long overdue at the VA. But the next VA secretary can only succeed in implementing that type of change if his boss, the president, first commits to doing whatever it takes to give our veterans the world class health care system they deserve.”


Another Ohio Republican, Sen. Rob Portman, praised Obama for selecting “someone with a wealth of experience managing a complex organization who has also had a distinguished military career.”

McDonald has financially supported Republican politicians in the past, according to federal election records, including Boehner and 2012 presidential nominee Mitt Romney.

McDonald, 61, graduated from West Point in 1975 and is about the same age as most of the senior generals in the Pentagon with whom he would have to work closely in the coming years. Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, graduated from West Point one year before McDonald, and Gen. Ray Odierno, the Army chief of staff, finished up at the academy one year after him. McDonald and acting VA secretary Sloan Gibson, who is expected to serve as his deputy, were West Point classmates.

RichmondPhilsFan wrote:

jerseyhoya wrote:As for the rights of corporations stuff, only two justices were willing to go so far as to say that people forfeit their rights to bring challenges under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act when they form a corporation, so that part of the decision was not 5-4. People trying to make some money and run a business shouldn't have to forfeit all of their rights. The question of where lines get drawn then is a fair one, but acting like it's preposterous that it gets asked is kind of disconnected from reality.

I don't think it's preposterous at all to suggest that a person gives up something when they avail themselves of the legal fiction of the corporate veil. Instead, the Supreme Court has increasingly expanded the corporate veil while refusing to make any corresponding limitations on that protection.

e.g., A homosexual employee can't personally sue his owner/boss for unlawful termination, but is instead limited to filing a claim against the company. Yet the company might now be able to claim some religious protection under RFRA in the employment action due to the owner's alleged moral objection to the homosexual lifestyle.

You can try to pretend that this is a narrow ruling based upon what is clearly dicta, but that case is coming at some point in the not-so-distant future.

jerseyhoya wrote:The question is where the line gets drawn of what they give up. Seems like the court made a pretty strong argument in the majority opinion.

jerseyhoya wrote:

RichmondPhilsFan wrote:

jerseyhoya wrote:As for the rights of corporations stuff, only two justices were willing to go so far as to say that people forfeit their rights to bring challenges under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act when they form a corporation, so that part of the decision was not 5-4. People trying to make some money and run a business shouldn't have to forfeit all of their rights. The question of where lines get drawn then is a fair one, but acting like it's preposterous that it gets asked is kind of disconnected from reality.

I don't think it's preposterous at all to suggest that a person gives up something when they avail themselves of the legal fiction of the corporate veil. Instead, the Supreme Court has increasingly expanded the corporate veil while refusing to make any corresponding limitations on that protection.

e.g., A homosexual employee can't personally sue his owner/boss for unlawful termination, but is instead limited to filing a claim against the company. Yet the company might now be able to claim some religious protection under RFRA in the employment action due to the owner's alleged moral objection to the homosexual lifestyle.

You can try to pretend that this is a narrow ruling based upon what is clearly dicta, but that case is coming at some point in the not-so-distant future.

It's not preposterous to suggest that a person gives up something when they form a corporation, which isn't what I said. The question is where the line gets drawn of what they give up. Seems like the court made a pretty strong argument in the majority opinion. And with Breyer and Kagan refusing to join Ginsburg on saying corporations cannot bring claims under the RFRA bit, it shows that it isn't a clear cut belief among the liberal justices on the court that corporations are undeserving of rights like these depending on the facts of the underlying case.

joe table wrote:As to the issue of the legal rights afforded to fictitious corporations, I think that is obviously a nuanced issue.

drsmooth wrote:

joe table wrote:As to the issue of the legal rights afforded to fictitious corporations, I think that is obviously a nuanced issue.

is anyone disputing that corporations have standing in law? The issue is whether corporations have any kind of claim to protection of their "spiritual or religious freedoms" (I feel compelled to put that stuff, worthy of Ionesco or Beckett, in quotes)

joe table wrote:This seems non-responsive to my post.