-First Step: Gore, Doerr, Powell, and the Back Door: Who Owns Obama?-Millions of newly minted and old unemployed plebs alike across the country can now breathe a sigh of relief as Obama’s first ever, ominous broadcast of “first steps” is available to all captive American taxpayers who have questions about which wealthy private citizens are getting their American Recovery and Reinvestment Act money. (The video above was made by (Americans United for Change.)
One of the leading corporations (Google) which will receive over $20 billion plus in subsidies for privacy invasive e-health plan development approved in the Stimulus Bill has one of its lead investors on Obama’s economic advisory board, just to make sure Joe Taxpayer’s money is being spent the right way. The Washington Post’s Cecelia Kang reports that President Obama's newly formed economic advisory board includes some high-tech heavyweights who will have a “direct line of communication” to the new administration as it races to stem the worsening economic crisis.
The members include Silicon Valley venture capital veteran and Google funder John Doerr, and Chuck Phillips, president of database software giant Oracle. The Obama administration said that there will be 15 advisers to “regularly provide direct advice” to Obama "to jump-start economic growth and facilitate economic stability." The announcement states that this also includes specific advice for “immediate solutions to the crisis.”
Kang observes that John Doerr’s significant investment in Google (he is a partner of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Beyers venture capital firm, which also includes Al Gore and Colin Powell) “only widens the pool of executives and other employees of the Internet search firm who are working for or advising the Obama administration.”
The Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder, in his article Feeling Good About What You’ve Bought, describes Obama’s “first step” video:
“One calls to mind Charles Grodin's character in Dave, wondering why the country needed to spend money making Americans feel good about cars they already bought? The answer, I think, lies in two words: "first step." They were used by President Obama today at the bill signing. They're used by Obama in an e-mail to his presidential campaign list. And they're in the new ad. The goal, I think, is to condition elites, and then the American people, to see the economic recovery act as one of several significant, expensive, complicated (or, to keep the metaphor, high, risky and precarious) steps that the government needs to take in order to right the economy.”
Change we can use or more corporate welfare, labor arbitrage and outsourcing? The ARRA mentions nothing about taxpayer money appropriations for single payer healthcare, but instead offers subsidies to corporations like Google whose investors and executives stand to prosper from. With all of these wealthy private industry experts advising Obama on how to spend our taxpayer money and which corporations to spend it on - *shock* like their own -- it’s a safe bet that we will be treated to more ominous, brief videos from Our Leader to keep us posted of the next steps in this finely tuned, corporate welfare, middle class wealth redistribution agenda-pitch.
-2Truthy
2 comments:
Isn't it telling that the most relief us plebes will get under the Stimulus Act is better unemployment benefits?
Isn't it amazing how little thought people give to this whole so-called corporate ruse of "retraining" and "unemployment benefits" eligibility that is deceptively marketed to "help" our citizens?
For the millions of of white collar citizens who have been working as contractors for years since the war on the white collar middle class began to eradicate them from the corporate workpool, this demographic isn't even eligible for unemployment or health benefits. And that retraining thing? Retrain for what? A friend of mine has his doctorate in engineering and so he's supposed to retrain as what? A tattoo artist?
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