02.18.11
Popular revolt in Wisconsin: Why not sooner?
A DailyKos blogger asks a question that’s bothered me for the past two years, at least:
However, this belated American uprising also strikes a melancholy note: where were all these people during the elections? It was our own sense of disenfranchisement and apathy that let the wolf in the door. Why is the popular will being expressed in the streets instead of the polling booth? Isn’t the chief glory of democracy the ability to channel the will of the people through normal political operations? Will religious fundamentalism and corporate greed return this country to the state of the Middle East?
The only popular uprising generated until now was the Tea Party, financed by billionaires.
While Facebook has been laughably credited with bringing down Mubarak, somehow social media hasn’t done s— here. With magnitudes more connectivity than the poverty-stricken nation at the head of the Nile, nothing except a lurch into extremism and all out corporate-financed class war on the civilian population.
The DailyKos writer adds:
Tonight Obama is meeting with bigwigs in Silicon valley. I wish he would meet with someone like me. I could tell him the problems with the economy can’t be solved just by persuading rich people to create jobs: there also has to be reforms to aid job seekers, to reduce the barriers that make it so difficult to get the jobs that are there. Efficiencies need to be developed from the bottom up.
Bowing and scraping before Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg was never a good idea. If the President were actually made of the stuff some people still think he has in him he would have canceled those plans and flown Air Force One into Madison.
But he didn’t.
Instead, this morning there is this item, the definition of insipid:
President Barack Obama dined with a dozen leaders of the U.S. technology industry including Apple Inc. Chief Executive Officer Steve Jobs and Facebook Inc. founder Mark Zuckerberg as he sought support for his education and innovation agenda to help promote growth. Cris Valerio reports on Bloomberg Television’s “InsideTrack.”
There he is with Nobel laureate and Pulitzer winner Mark Zuckerberg.
“Who got the best seats?” writes some new Gilded Age sissy fop at the Washington Post:
Apple’s Steve Jobs, who still looks thin as he continues his medical leave. Also Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, who was seated on the president’s right.
Good thing President Obama brought his security brigade to the dinner with high-tech executives. The combined net worth of this crowd … someone do the math, please and let me know.
Also at the table: Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Cisco CEO John Chambers, Kleiner Perkins partner John Doerr, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz and Twitter CEO Dick Costello.
When even a Wall Street Journal opinion blogs notices the disconnection, you have real proof of a leadership problem:
Here, though, the job-seeking president and the t-shirt wearing masses of Silicon Valley may have an inherent conflict. Those tech guys represent a future of a highly skilled but low numbers workforce. Apple, with a market value of $330 billion, has 46,600 employees. Ford, whose market cap one-seventh that of Apple, employs about 160,000 people. Another “old economy??? lion, General Electric, has roughly 300,000 employees.
Exhorting Steve Jobs for more phone kit made in China and rubble-izing what little is left of the US popular music industry is certainly an idea for the Fools Hall of Fame.