// bad business should be gone.
// who is bailing out those laid-off or outsourced.

Obama suggests some automaker executives should lose jobs

CHICAGO — President-elect Barack Obama fired a warning shot today at the top executives of the Big Three auto companies, saying that they should either agree to drastic reforms or be sacked.

“If this management team that’s currently in place doesn’t understand the urgency of the situation and is not willing to make the tough choices and adapt to these new circumstances, then they should go,” Obama said at a brief Sunday afternoon news conference here.

In similarly plain terms, he portrayed the Bush administration as dragging its feet on the home mortgage crisis, and pledged that he would act immediately upon being sworn in next month.

“We have not seen the kind of aggressive steps in the housing market [from the administration] to stem foreclosures that I would like to see,” he said.

Without going into details, he said his transition team had had conversations with Bush officials on the mortgage issue and is preparing plans.

“If it is not done during the transition it will be done by me,” he promised.

But Obama tempered his language toward Detroit and the White House with notes of caution and patience.

“If on the other hand they are willing, able and show themselves committed to making those important changes then that raises a different situation,” he said of the auto company executives.

“I think the administration understands the severity of the problem,” Obama said of President Bush, offering a more generous assessment than he'd made during the campaign. “I think they want to do the right thing.”

Obama, who warned during an appearance on Meet the Press earlier today that the economic news "is going to get worse before [it] gets better," expounded at length upon the jobs and economic growth package he began to outline in his Saturday radio address.

Citing his plans to spend money on energy efficiency, school construction, broadband and medical information technology, he explained why he was proposing infrastructure investment beyond the typical fare of roads and bridges.

Mixing job growth and technology upgrades, he said, was aimed at getting people back to work now and benefiting them again down the line.

“All of these things are designed to have long-term payoffs for taxpayers, not just for individual businesses,” Obama said.

Obama spoke for just under 20 minutes, taking three questions from reporters.

The purpose of the session was to officially announce that retired Army Gen. Eric Shinseki would serve as secretary of veterans affairs in the new administration.

Obama, wearing an American flag lapel pin and standing before eight flags, used the occasion to mark the anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor, vowing to honor today’s veterans in the same fashion as those who fought in World War II.

“We owe it to all our veterans to honor them as we honored our Greatest Generation – not just with words, but with deeds.”

Shinseki, a combat-wounded Vietnam veteran and former chief of staff of the Army who famously clashed with the Pentagon’s civilian leadership over Iraq war policy, also singled out the unique needs of those who have served there and in Afghanistan.