Now that President Obama has his coveted health care reform in hand, albeit there is a ways to go before it can become a reality, and we have seen what he did with the banks, insurance companies, auto companies and mortgage companies, it is time to ask if he is truly a social architect intent on forming a new American social structure based on government ownership and/or control, or if he is simply a stooge for the powerful special interests who helped finance his campaigns.
With his detached attitude and unwillingness to get immersed in the mechanics of fighting for his own legislative agenda, it seems he may be the consummate compromiser yet his actions are leading us in a very specific direction. Since he first took office there has been an obvious pattern of first taking care of his special interest contributors which leaves his true intent in question.
Look at the record. Several of the first Executive Orders he issued as president greatly strengthened the unions and even gave them a degree of control and influence over construction projects and other activities that were contained in his economic stimulus program. No Democrat or Republican president before ever made such blatant concessions to the unions.
The auto bailout he engineered guaranteed the unions major control of General Motors and protected them from losing billions of dollars in unsecured losses from GM stock they owned while the bond holders from General Motors were left out in the cold.
He even delayed the provision in the health care reform bill to tax the most luxurious health insurance policies until 2018, long after he would be president. Under the contracts negotiated by the unions with auto makers these luxury policies were a major contributor to the very bankruptcy of the auto industry.
The most frequent visitor to the White House is Andy Stern, President of the SEIU, the service workers union who Stern claims spent more than $60 million to get Obama elected. So who is to benefit most from expanded health care, the service workers union of Stern who is trying to unionize the health care industry.
Then when Congress did not approve his Deficit Reduction Task Force he created it by Executive Order and then promptly appointed the same Andy Stern to the group. I find it rather odd that a union organizer qualifies as an expert in economics and knows how to reduce our federal debt when he has been benefitting from the very Obama initiatives that have resulted in an avalanche of new debt.
Of course Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the housing mortgage companies, were taken over by the Obama government although the media does not seem interested in talking about it. In this case Obama took care of Wall Street poster boy Goldman Sachs, another major Obama contributor and supporter, whose actions in selling the sub-prime mortgages helped destroy the housing market.
Did you know $217 billion have already been given by Obama to these two housing agencies to bail them out of their last mess?. Did you know Rahm Emanuel was on the Board of one of them and when he was with the Clinton administration they passed the federal commodity loopholes that allowed the deceptive investment practices that caused oil price spikes and brought down the world economy?
In fact his ties to Goldman Sachs are best illustrated by the fact he approved the AIG insurance bailout to protect a too big to fail company and $64 billion in government money went to Goldman and other banks who recouped 100% of their toxic holdings in the bankrupt company while the stock and bond holders got a fraction of their value.
Finally, though Obama promised he was considering taking on the powerful Trial Lawyers Association and was going to incorporate tort reform to reduce the multi-billion dollar cost of medical malpractice, it was left out of his final bill. It's not surprising since they were at the top of the list of special interest contributors to his campaign.
Social architect or special interest stooge, the jury is out but the actions seem to have taken a sharp left turn. Big government and multi-trillion dollar debt are the products of his efforts, a very left leaning legacy to date. Yet he may be the godfather of his own special interests and at the top of the list come Goldman Sachs (Wall Street), the Trial Lawyers and the unions, particularly SEIU. All stand to benefit greatly from his health care reform.
His unfinished agenda includes more social redirection as he says Immigration reform is next followed by Cap and Trade and other initiatives. Ironically, he and the Democrats controlling congress still are not even talking about the economy, unemployment, jobs and credit issues affecting Main Street, the very issues Main Street wants addressed.
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