Former Time Warner Chairman Richard D. Parsons is under consideration for the commerce secretary post in the Barack Obama administration, according to reports.

The move comes after New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson withdrew his nomination due to an investigation into campaign contributors and state contracts.

Parsons is one of a dozen members President-elect Obama’s Economic Advisory Board, which is helping Obama come up with ideas to get the economy moving. His departure as Time Warner chairman at the end of 2008 was widely expected. The news was first reported by CNN, which is owned by Time Warner.

The Obama transition team would not comment, citing its policy of not speculating on possible appointments.

Richardson’s withdrawal was the first blip in Obama’s cabinet nomination process. Obama hasn’t been implicated in the New Mexico case. His spokesman Robert Gibbs said Sunday he expected a new commerce secretary to be chosen soon, but there wasn’t a timetable.

Obama accepted Richardson’s withdrawal with “deep regret,” and praised the New Mexico governor. “Gov. Richardson is an outstanding public servant and would have brought to the job of commerce secretary and our economic team great insights accumulated through an extraordinary career in federal and state office. It is a measure of his willingness to put the nation first that he has removed himself as a candidate for the cabinet in order to avoid any delay in filling this important economic post at this critical time.”

In Parsons’ five years as CEO of Time Warner, he tamed a sprawling, unruly media octopus. Silencing early critics, he took a rudderless company with disparate holdings, such as Warner Bros. studios, HBO, the Time Inc. stable of magazines, and AOL, and transformed it into a uniform, functional enterprise. He simplified the corporate structure, strengthened the balance sheet, and discarded nonperforming assets. Not to say he hasn’t had major challenges.

Despite his management prowess, the stock price has been stuck in a range, fueling shareholder dissent, most notably billionaire investor Carl Icahn’s push to break up the company in 2006. Through it all, Parsons maintained his position as one of the most powerful media moguls on the planet.

Parsons’ joined Time Warner as its president in February 1995, and has been a member of the company’s board of directors since January 1991. As president, he oversaw the company’s filmed entertainment and music businesses, and all corporate staff functions, including financial activities, legal affairs, public affairs, and administration.

Before joining Time Warner, Parsons was chairman and CEO of Dime Bancorp Inc., one of the largest thrift institutions in the U.S. Previously, he was the managing partner of New York law firm Patterson, Belknap, Webb & Tyler.

He held various positions in state and federal government, as counsel for Nelson Rockefeller and as a senior White House aide under President Gerald Ford.

Parsons received his undergraduate education at the University of Hawaii and his legal training at Union University’s Albany Law School.

Parsons’ civic and nonprofit commitments include co-chairman of the Mayor’s Commission on Economic Opportunity in New York; Chairman Emeritus of the Partnership for New York City; Chairman of the Apollo Theatre Foundation; and service on the boards of Howard University, the Museum of Modern Art and the American Museum of Natural History. He also serves on the boards of Citigroup and Estée Lauder.

The Department of Commerce is the cabinet department concerned with promoting economic growth. The mission of the department is to promote job creation and improved living standards by creating an infrastructure that promotes economic growth, competitiveness, and sustainable development. It houses numerous agencies, including the Census Bureau, the Minority Business Development Agency, the Patent and Trademark Office and the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration.

– Derek T. Dingle contributed to this article.

Further reading: Parsons’ Time

Gov. Bill Richardson at the January 2008 unveiling of New Mexico’s Supercomputer. (Source: Intel)

President-elect Barack Obama announced the nomination of New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson as his commerce secretary at a Chicago news conference this morning.

Richardson, who had sought the Democratic presidential nomination this year, served as United Nations ambassador and energy secretary under former President Bill Clinton. After ending his bid for the White House, he broke from the Clintons to support Obama. Richardson is the first Latino to be named to the president-elect’s cabinet.

“After nearly two years traveling across this country, meeting with workers, visiting businesses large and small, I am more confident than ever before that we have everything we need to renew our economy — we have the ingenuity and technology, the skill, and commitment — we just need to put it to work,” said Obama. “It’s time to not just address our immediate economic threats, but to start laying the groundwork for long-term economic prosperity — to help American businesses grow and thrive at home, and expand our efforts to promote American enterprise around the world.

“This work is the core mission of the secretary of commerce. And with his breadth and depth of experience in public life, Governor Richardson is uniquely suited for this role as a leading economic diplomat for America.”

As commerce chief, Richardson will oversee the Minority Business Development Agency, the only federal agency specifically created to foster the growth and development of minority business. MBDA is also responsible for monitoring and working with all federal agencies to ensure a fair and open competition process for awarding government contracts that includes minority- and women-owned business goals.

“To this crucial work of restoring America’s international standing, Bill will bring a leadership style all his own,” Obama said at his press conference. “Bill has never been content to learn just from briefing books — never satisfied with only the official version of the story. During his time in Congress, he held more than 2,500 town-hall meetings, so he could hear directly from constituents. He was a regular in the U.N. cafeteria, mixing it up with U.N. employees over lunch. And during his 2002 campaign for governor, he actually broke a world record by shaking nearly 14,000 hands in just eight hours.”

Ralph Moore, president of Ralph G. Moore and Associates, a firm that helps minority and women-owned businesses become certified as federal contractors, applauds the choice and believes that Richardson will be an enthusiastic and effective advocate for minority business. He says, “When Richardson headed Energy, there were a number of minority contractors who did very well. He was a champion for 8(a) and other programs that benefited them and I think he’ll carry that same approach to Commerce. We can make this choice work for us.”

C. Howie Hodges, who was an assistant director for the department’s Minority Business Development Agency during Clinton’s first administration, agrees. “Richardson had a very good strategic team and I have no doubt that he will put in place a very capable combination of savvy business people who will also have the political skills to help execute Obama’s mandate to create economic and job growth,” says Hodges, who is currently a senior vice president of One Economy Corp., a global nonprofit that delivers access to technology and content to low- and moderate-income households.

In addition, says Hodges, during the Clinton administration, the agency actively aimed to expand opportunities for minority and women-owned businesses in the private and international trade sectors. Under the leadership of the late Secretary Ron Brown, who died in a plane crash over Croatia, the agency led trade missions to several foreign nations for those businesses and helped them form strategic alliances with such major corporations as Disney, Kodak, and Lockheed Martin.

If Obama and Richardson were to seek counsel from Moore or Hodges, both say they’d advise the administration to transfer the Small Business Administration’s minority business activities to MBDA, because they have floundered under the SBA, whose primary focus has been providing loans and access to capital, but not necessarily to the benefit of minority businesses.

They also believe that with the proper funding and leadership, MBDA could be a major force in helping minority businesses gain increased access to capital, assistance with capacity expansion and joint venture opportunities with major corporations.

“A critical issue is capacity building. If in fact small businesses create two-thirds of jobs, you need minority businesses to be able to perform in the economic recovery. To do that, they need to build more capacity; that should be MBDA’s number one job,” says Moore.

Because MBDA works with federal agencies across the board, adds Hodges, despite not having a direct appropriation, during the Clinton administration it was able to establish memorandums of understanding with various agencies to form joint ventures with cities and private-sector corporations and explore a variety of international trade opportunities. “Everybody kind of honed in on what their agency could do to promote these very broad goals. Access to capital wasn’t just at SBA; it was at all of the federal agencies. Access to emerging markets wasn’t just through Commerce, it was also through Energy, which saw tremendous growth in working with minority and women owned businesses,” explains Hodges.

“Given the proper funding, I think MBDA can do a lot more. When Richardson was at Energy, the department was among the leading participants in minority business programs,” says Moore.

Under Richardson, Hodges believes that minority businesses should seek both increased access to capital, which is always a critical component to success, and access to markets and opportunity. Small business loans, expanded credit, encouraging venture capital companies and minority venture capital companies to invest in minority business will be paramount to the abilities of mid-tier companies’ to build capacity and start-up firms to create new business.

“When you look at job growth and taking our economy from a recession to one that’s growing, a lot of that growth is going to come from new businesses hiring people,” says Hodges.

The important role that green jobs and businesses, environmental sustainability, and energy efficiency will play in rebuilding the nation’s economy is another reason why he thinks Richardson’s past experience at Energy will be an asset in his new role. At the same time, he cautions, it would be unwise to underestimate the importance of technology, another area over which Commerce has oversight.

“Richardson and Obama’s administration need to look at creating a national broadband strategy to help America continue its global competitiveness that will enable it to provide a catalyst for economic growth and job creation,” says Hodges. “MBDA has been underutilized and a lot will depend on the administration. If it has a priority and focus, the agency will.”

In a move that is expected to ease speculation amid the continued roller coaster ride that is the economy, President-elect Barack Obama and Vice President-elect Joe Biden will introduce his new economic leadership team today. a major step toward enacting an economic recovery plan that aims to save or create 2.5 million jobs over the next two years.

The plan, announced over the weekend, will likely exceed the $175 billion Obama proposed during the campaign. It would include new money for infrastructure projects, new environmental technologies, modernizing schools, and tax cuts for low- and middle-income taxpayers. It won’t call for tax hikes for the wealthy, something Sen. John McCain warned voters about. Throughout his campaign, Obama had a keen emphasis on the economy. However, the scope of the recovery package is far more ambitious than Obama had spelled out during his presidential campaign, when he proposed $175 billion of spending and tax-cutting stimulus.

Obama aides on Sunday called on the new Congress to pass by the Jan. 20 inauguration legislation that meets Obama’s two-year goal of saving or creating 2.5 million jobs. Democratic congressional leaders said they would get to work when Congress convenes Jan. 6 with bigger Democratic majorities in the House and Senate.

Most likely heading Obama’s economic team will be Timothy Geithner as treasury secretary and Lawrence Summers as head of the National Economic Council. Obama also has reportedly settled on New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson as his commerce secretary.

“I have already directed my economic team to come up with an Economic Recovery Plan that will mean 2.5 million more jobs by January of 2011 — a plan big enough to meet the challenges we face that I intend to sign soon after taking office,” Obama said during his weekly address. “We’ll be working out the details in the weeks ahead, but it will be a two-year, nationwide effort to jumpstart job creation in America and lay the foundation for a strong and growing economy.”

Obama may delay any tax increases to 2011, when current Bush administration tax cuts expire.

Deborah Creighton Skinner is the editorial director at BlackEnterprise.com

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But seriously, yesterday  investors were braced for another dismal performance of a market that was in a 620-point trading range. However, President-elect Barack Obama gave the financial markets just the tonic it needed to end the week: a rally.

How did he do it? He reportedly nominated highly-respected New York Reserve Bank President Timothy F. Geithner as his administration’s treasury secretary. After news hit Wall Street, the Dow rose nearly 500 points in the final hour of trading, gaining 6.5% to close above 8,000. The potential nomination of Geithner signaled to investors that Obama will move quickly on the execution of the last stages of the $700 billion financial bailout, which for weeks has been considered by many observers to have been bungled by the Bush administration’s indecision and missteps.

Thus far, half the funds of the Troubled Asset Relief Program have been deployed, fueling confusion and frustration within the nation’s financial community. Also, what appeals to investors about Geithner is the fact that as New York Fed chief he has participated in such industry-saving acts as the sale of Bear Stearns to JPMorgan Chase and the multibillion dollar rescue of AIG, one of the world’s largest insurers. Moreover, he is an experienced hand at Treasury who has worked for five secretaries, including serving as the right hand of Clinton Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers who, in fact, was reportedly on the short list for the post.

The almost-certain move, along with other appointments, clearly indicates that Obama will be ready to lead on Day One – a criticism he dealt with repeatedly during the primaries and general election.  So far, the president-elect’s transition has been considered the smoothest in history and, if the rumor mill is to be believed, he has proven to have exercised unassailable judgment in his selection of his cabinet, including Eric Holder as attorney general, former Sen. Tom Daschle as health and human services secretary, Bill Richardson as commerce secretary and Sen. Hillary Clinton as secretary of state.

A student of Abraham Lincoln, the president who preserved the union during the Civil War, Obama is believed to be building “a team of rivals,” pundits say. But his legacy may prove to be more aligned with Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the nation’s chief executive who moved the country out the Great Depression by remaking America. Obviously, it’s too soon to judge Obama as President. That assessment will come after Jan. 20. But with the likely appointment, Obama’s stock has definitely risen.

Derek T. Dingle is the editor in chief of Black Enterprise magazine

At least that what it seems after word that Obama is seriously considering naming Timothy Geithner, president of the New York Federal Reserve, as treasury secretary, leaked out.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average ended 494.13 points higher, up 6.5%, at 8046.42 on reports of Geithner’s new role.

If nominated and confirmed by the Senate, Geithner, 47, would be tasked with tackling the current economic slowdown and a major credit crunch that are threatening to put the U.S. in the deepest recession in more than a generation. As president of the New York federal reserve, Geithner has played a key role in the government’s response to the financial crisis.

Obama has repeatedly referred to the economic crisis as the top priority for his new administration. On the campaign trail, Obama’s calm response to dealing with the economic roller coaster was a stark contrast to Sen. John McCain, who couldn’t seem to formulate a cohesive economic strategy.

Geithner held posts in the Treasury Department under three administrations and five secretaries before moving to the New York Fed in 2003. He also held positions at the International Monetary Fund and was employed at the private firm of former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.

If the rumor mill is really correct, Sen. Hillary Clinton has accepted the post of secretary of state and Eric Holder will be the next attorney general. New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson has also emerged as a likely choice as commerce secretary.

The Obama-Biden transition team has yet to make any formal announcements about the treasury, commerce or state deparment posts.

Deborah Creighton SKinner is the editorial director at BlackEnterprise.com