Posted on 11/12/2009 9:02:23 AM PST by dennisw
Obama and his team have done little to disguise their mistrust of big business -- except when it comes to one very large, very influential technology company.
Google executives, led by CEO Eric Schmidt and co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, are scary smart and supremely self-confident (much like the President himself), and despite their company's growing power, they depict themselves as advocates for consumers.
"What we shared is a belief in changing the world from the bottom up, not from the top down," Obama told Google employees during a 2007 visit to its headquarters in Mountain View, Calif.
Indeed, two of Obama's economic tenets -- support for more U.S.-educated engineers and the expansion of Internet services to poor and rural areas -- grew out of a visit to Google headquarters in 2004, an encounter Obama recalls in his book "The Audacity of Hope."
Google managers and employees were some of the strongest supporters of candidate Obama, donating around $803,000 to his presidential campaign, according to the website OpenSecrets.org. Among corporate employees, only staffers at Goldman Sachs (GS, Fortune 500) and Microsoft (MSFT, Fortune 500) gave more.
CEO Schmidt actively stumped for the candidate and served as an informal economic adviser during the campaign, and after Obama was elected, Schmidt and other Google executives forked over $25,000 apiece to help pay for the inaugural celebration.
Because the company and administration are so like-minded, it should come as no surprise that Google executives soon found themselves assuming roles in the Obama administration.
Nevertheless, Google's newfound access in Washington is striking for two reasons: Obama and his team pride themselves on maintaining a distance from corporations -- before taking office the President pledged to close the "revolving door" of industry executives who go on to regulate their former corporate peers.
(Excerpt) Read more at money.cnn.com ...
Obama just Googles to decide policy issues.
Google is responsible for about 10% of network traffic. They don’t want to have to pay for it. So they lie about “net neutrality” and how it will be so great for everyone. In reality, net neutrality destroys the incentive for innovation as well as introducing the idea of regulating the Internet.
It is a good example of American style corporatism.
I have yet to see any proof of that much-repeated assertion. Supremely self-confident (= very much full of himself) perhaps, though it strikes me he often seems self-aware of his actual vacuity, but scary smart? Where's his thesis, where are the articles he published in the Harvard Law Review, etc, etc? This emporer has no intellectual clothes.
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