What kind of education does it take to become president? Find out here.

By Chris Kyle

John F. Kennedy, the 35th president of the United States, once suggested that we "remember that our nation's first great leaders were also our first great scholars."

Case in point: Five of our first six U.S. presidents received a college degree, and the sixth, George Washington, received a surveyor's certificate from The College of William and Mary.

In honor of President's Day and the 43 men who have held the job, let's take a look at some certificate and degrees available today, and the presidents who earned them.
TEACHING CERTIFICATES

Lyndon B. Johnson earned his teaching certificate from Southwest Texas State Teachers College in 1930 (now Texas State University-San Marcos) and worked as a teacher before and after graduation.

Woodrow Wilson served as president of Princeton University and worked as a teacher prior to becoming President of the United States. John Adams taught before he went into politics, as did Andrew Jackson and Grover Cleveland (who landed an assistant teacher position through the help of his brother William).

Search for Teaching certificate programs today.
ASSOCIATE'S DEGREES

Harry Truman attended Kansas City Law School (now the University of Missouri-Kansas City). Though he didn't complete his Juris Doctor (JD) degree, his two years of schooling would have been enough time to earn an associate's degree in paralegal studies or court reporting.

Barack Obama has been very vocal about the power of an associate's degree. "In an economy where jobs requiring at least an associate's degree are projected to grow twice as fast as jobs requiring no college experience, " he says. "It's never been more essential to continue education and training after high school."

Find an Associate's degree program that fits your goals.
BACHELOR'S DEGREES

Most of our presidents - 34 to be exact - have earned a bachelor's degree.

Jimmy Carter and Herbert Hoover studied engineering in college and earned bachelor's of science degrees. They are the only two presidents to have found work as engineers.

Ronald Reagan studied sociology and economics at Eureka College in Illinois, becoming an actor and sportscaster before launching his career in politics.

Search for Bachelor's degree programs now.
MBA DEGREES

When he was elected in 2000, George W. Bush became the first U.S. President to have earned his master's in business administration (MBA), though this fact isn't so surprising when you consider that the world's first MBA program wasn't established until 1908.

Today, online MBA programs are redefining the business school model, perhaps paving the way for the very first president with an online MBA degree.

Check out these online MBA programs now.
LAW DEGREES

More than half of our 44 presidents (23 total) have been lawyers, including Obama, which is a trend that began with John Adams, our second president.

Obama earned his JD from Harvard, where he served as the first black president of the school's law review.

William Howard Taft is the only president who also served as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. He received his bachelor of laws, a precursor to the JD, at the University of Cincinnati.

Search for Law degree programs now.

If our presidents have taught us anything, it's that many different degrees can lead to greatness.

So look into online degree and certificate programs today and who knows... We could be celebrating you on a future Presidents' Day.

COLUMBUS, Ohio — President Barack Obama trumpeted new construction jobs created by federal stimulus law Friday, while acknowledging the grinding toll the slow-to-rebound economy is taking on people.

"I'm under no illusion we are where we need to be yet," Obama said. The occasion was a groundbreaking for the 10,000th road project paid for by stimulus money, situated in Columbus, Ohio, an event that gave the president an occasion to leave Washington and tout progress on jobs.

Flanked by workers in hard hats and yellow safety vests, Obama pointed to increasing signs of economic vitality, including some evidence that businesses are starting to hire again. But he said that's not enough.

"For these folks, the only jobs we create that matter are the ones that provide for their families. So while the recovery may start with projects like this, it can't end here," the president said.

Obama's brief comments offered no new initiatives or any significant changes in the overall message of hope. The event amounted to a picture-taking opportunity – framed by men in hardhats and wearing bright construction-style shirts – and a chance for him to roll up his sleeves and get into a community to witness life firsthand outside the Washington Beltway.

The watchdog overseeing TARP doubts that President Barack Obama's plan to boost lending to small businesses will actually work, according to prepared remarks delivered Tuesday.

The plan, like TARP, relies on injecting taxpayer funds into banks. While TARP funds were dispersed to stabilize the financial system, Congress also intended that the money be used to maintain lending and to stem the rising tide of foreclosures.

TARP accomplished neither, which is why Paul Atkins of the Congressional Oversight Panel doubts this new plan will work.

"After a thorough review, we found little evidence that these programs have had a noticeable effect on business credit availability," Atkins said in his prepared remarks to the House Financial Services Committee.

This new $30 billion initiative involves pumping money into community banks -- those with less than $10 billion in assets -- with the hope that they'll lend it out to small businesses. Banks will get the taxpayer cash at a five percent rate; the more they increase their lending, the cheaper the money gets. It can drop to one percent.

No such incentive existed in TARP.

It's the incentive that leads administration officials to think that this plan will boost lending.

In a recent report, the Congressional Oversight Panel said that banks with more than $100 billion in assets cut their lending after receiving taxpayer cash, while medium-sized banks experienced an increase.

Megabanks cut their small business lending by nine percent from 2008 to 2009; their overall lending dropped just four percent.

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama is again urging Congress to send him a package of tax breaks and other incentives to help small businesses grow and create jobs.

The legislation would eliminate capital gains taxes for investments in such companies and encourage people to open businesses by offering tax relief to small startups.

Obama says his administration is constantly hearing from small businesses that want to keep the workers they have and hire more employees, but are having trouble getting credit.

Obama spoke at a White House Rose Garden event with small business owners, his second such event in recent weeks.

In the words of one consultant: "Business would have a seat at the table, but business wouldn't be able to buy all the chairs"

On Sunday, Feb. 10, after he found out he'd won that day's Democratic Presidential caucuses in Maine, but before his appearance on CBS's 60 Minutes, Senator Barack Obama (D-Ill.) sat down at the keyboard of his computer to write an e-mail. Not to a media consultant or a delegate counter, but to banker Rober Wolf, CEO of UBS Americas (UBS). The two men exchanged notes about the Senate-passed economic stimulus package and that weekend's G-7 economic summit, Wolf says.

A banker as Obama's pen pal? Hard to believe, given the senator's liberal image. But in between rallies and airplane flights on the campaign trail, Obama has also taken time to consult on the economy with billionaire Warren Buffett, whose support of rolling back the Bush tax cuts Obama often cites in his stump speeches. Obama has also been in touch with former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, who endorsed the freshman senator in January. "When I sat down with him, I found him to be unbelievably refreshing and smart and thoughtful," says Wolf, who first met Obama at the offices of financier George Soros. The UBS chief has gone on to raise more than $1 million for the Obama campaign.

The rest of Corporate America may not be persuaded as easily. After all, Obama is hardly a shoo-in for the C-suite set: He's got a scant three-year record on the national stage, and he wants to roll back the Bush tax cuts that benefit many of the people running big American companies. Plus, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce gives him the lowest rating of any of the three major contenders for the Presidency, behind Senator Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) and Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.). But Obama's sweep of the Feb. 12 "Potomac Primary" in Maryland, Virginia, and the District of Columbia makes him a very real contender for the Democratic Presidential nomination.

Economic Agenda

So what would an Obama Presidency look like for business? "It would be a pragmatic, center-left administration," says Democratic political strategist Steve McMahon, who is unaligned with a Presidential candidate this year. "He's been pretty clear that business would have a seat at the table, but business wouldn't be able to buy all the chairs."

Obama's record in the Senate is thin, but it does hold some indicators of where he might go as President. Obama has sponsored bills backing a host of traditional Democratic causes, from union labor to alternative fuel to the earned income tax credit. In one move that was unpopular among business executives, Obama sponsored a bill to give shareholders a nonbinding proxy vote on executive pay. Obama voted for a free-trade pact with Peru that contained provisos to protect the Peruvian environment and Peruvian labor. That's popular stuff with the American left, but hard to take if you're a U.S. business owner who wants costs to stay low in your new Peru operation. And in a reflection of the Democratic Party's drift away from pure free-trade positions, Obama says he would look to amend the NAFTA trade agreement to add similar protections to the Clinton-era pact.

After a tour of the Janesville (Wis.) General Motors Assembly Plant on Feb. 13, Obama plans to make a major speech laying out an economic agenda for the rest of the campaign, including details of his plan to restore "balance" to the economy and create millions of new jobs. Wisconsin holds its primary on Feb. 19.

"Less Confrontational" Style

But Obama has also taken several steps that aren't typical of his fellow liberal senators. He has stocked his Capitol Hill staff with employees whose résumés include McKinsey, the old Andersen Consulting, and other nonpartisan business advisory firms. He joined forces with conservatives on bills designed to improve ethics and transparency in Washington. He voted for a bill in 2005 that made life harder for trial lawyers—a traditional Democratic constituency—by allowing defendants to shift cases more easily to federal court, which can be less favorable to plaintiffs. And he pushed an outside-the-box proposal that would help Detroit automakers pay legacy health-care costs on the condition they reinvest the subsequent savings into hybrids and other fuel-efficient cars. "His whole style of governing is less confrontational," says Bob Shrum, a long-time Democratic Presidential campaign strategist who's unaligned in 2008.

During his earlier eight years in the Illinois state senate, Obama also posted a record leavened with both traditional Democratic solutions and more pro-business efforts. He backed long-touted programs like expanding the earned income tax credit for poor families and expanding enterprise zones to boost development in depressed areas. But he pushed for a technology development fund to recruit sophisticated companies to the state and for tax incentives to businesses. "He was as liberal as could be at times, but he still worked with us," says Jerry Roper, president and CEO of the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce. "We'd talk on the phone, or I'd go see him. He's a good guy."

Careful Streamlining

Some of the names that might fill in the org chart in an Obama Administration are also telling. Obama—whose own father was a Kenyan economist with a PhD from Harvard University—has cultivated a group of economic advisers. They're generally careful technocrats, and are led by University of Chicago professor Austan Goolsbee. Among the others: Jeffrey Liebman and David Cutler of Harvard and Christina and David Romer of the University of California, Berkeley. Goolsbee has shown a preference for making economic initiatives easier to understand and use, an effort Obama calls "iPod government."

On the campaign trail, Obama and Goolsbee have crafted proposals to streamline government programs like the Medicare Part D prescription drug benefit, which Goolsbee feels is too complicated. Same with student loan applications and tax forms. Goolsbee says the distinction with Clinton is most evident in the candidates' plans to increase the personal savings rate. Obama would create an automatic 3% savings withholding from every paycheck that employees could opt out of if they want to. Clinton, on the other hand, proposes a targeted tax break to incentivize savings. The Clinton plan, says Goolsbee, "is what the playbook says to do. But the research says tax credits won't induce very many people to actually open savings accounts."

A Good Business Partner?

Still, business has traditionally preferred Republicans in the White House. In its most recent Senate tally, the Chamber of Commerce gave likely GOP nominee McCain an 80% favorable rating, compared with Clinton at 67% and Obama at 55%. Even worse for the two main Democrats, the National Association of Manufacturers rated both a zero, while McCain garnered 100%.

Those grades haven't hurt Obama's fund-raising. As a candidate he has eschewed contributions from political action committees and federal lobbyists. Yet he's been able to rake in cash at a blistering pace of about $1 million per day from individual donors, largely over the Internet. That includes money from employees of old-line industries. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, top contributors to Obama in 2007 included donors from law firms, investment houses, and real estate companies. In total, the center's analysis shows that Clinton is somewhat more favored by business contributors than is Obama: Eighty-five percent of her donations came from donors affiliated with business, while only 80% of Obama's did.

Boston, Massachusetts – On the third day of Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s visit in Boston, the USA, on Tuesday, he attended a view exchange forum with academics from Harvard University, Boston about the effort to develop nation’s quality.

Wednesday, 04 November 2009

First, fighting against the mafia who controls court decisions.

Second, implementing the revitalization of defense industry.

Third, handling the terrorism.

Fourth, finding the resolution of electricity issues.

Fifth, increasing the food security and production.

Sixth, conducting the revitalization of fertilizer and sugar factory.

Seventh, setting the more conclusive steps to manage the complexity of land and landscape usage.

Eighth, increasing the infrastructure.

Ninth, increasing the allowance for micro, small and medium enterprises.

Tenth, budgeting.

Eleven, handling the environment and climate change.

Twelfth, carrying out the health reform by changing the society’s paradigm.

Thirteenth, implementing the education reform.

Fourteenth, being alert on disaster control.

And the last, intensifying the coordination amongst central and regional government in development in all sectors.


Source:

Monday, 16 November 2009