Obama borrows from the Chavez book of plays

As the founder and former President of Free Venezuela, Inc, a non-profit organization dedicated to researching and analyzing the policies and activities of the Venezuelan socialist regime led by Hugo Chavez, my duties required me to stay abreast of the news there, to form intelligence networks that provided information that was not making it into the mainstream news, assess its quality, and then reports to members of Congress.

Our work was used by Florida Senators and Congressmen sitting on International Relations committees, to call for hearings and to form policy. It also was of good enough quality that we were contacted by officers within SOCOM (Southern Command) and the FBI. I presented information on news programs, debated socialist professors from local universities, and was invited to speak at the University of Miami. I also was invited to serve as an independent elections observer for the Presidential Recall Referendum.

I provide this brief snippet of my bio in order to explain that I have a fairly deep and unique view of the Venezuelan government’s socialist policies. That understanding also provides me with a unique perspective into what we see coming from the Obama administration. That knowledge and experience led me, during the 2008 election, to warn that Obama’s stated intentions were alarmingly similar to the failed socialist policies of Hugo Chavez, and were indicative that Obama truly was the redistributionist socialist ideologue about which many pundits were warning.

New information has come to light that will send shivers down the spines of citizens enlightened enough to understand the implications.

In particular, I feel compelled to analyze comments made by Robert Reich, Economic Advisor President Obama, spoken in an Economic Recovery Plan meeting on 01/07/2009. These comments were recorded and broadcast on C-Span2, so no one can claim that this is false, or “taken out of context”.

Robert Reich: “It seems to me that infrastructure spending is a very good and important way to stimulate the economy quickly. To find projects that can be done that have a high social return, that can also be done with the greatest speed possible. I am concerned, as I’m sure many of you are, that these jobs not simply go to high-skilled people who are already professionals or to white male construction workers…I have nothing against white, male construction workers, I’m just saying that there are a lot of other people who have needs as well, and therefore in my remarks, I have suggested to you… ways that criteria can be set so that the money goes to others: the long-term unemployed, minorities, women, people who are not necessarily construction workers or high-skilled professionals.”

To start with, please note that Reich qualified his statement as providing advice about infrastructure spending. This has been the mantra lately by the Obama administration: that the Bush administration neglected investment in the physical infrastructure and, following FDR’s model of revitalization of the economy by putting people to work building infrastructure, Obama has highlighted this as a priority.

Obama said, in his inaugural speech:

"The state of the economy calls for action, bold and swift, and we will act - not only to create new jobs, but to lay a new foundation for growth. We will build the roads and bridges, the electric grids and digital lines that feed our commerce and bind us together. We will restore science to its rightful place, and wield technology's wonders to raise health care's quality and lower its cost. We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories. "

When under the intense view of the national spotlight, Obama described infrastructure spending that actually is infrastructure: highways, bridges, power networks.

But under less intense scrutiny, his advisors, and the Democrat congressmen present who agreed with him, applied the term to something entirely different. And they also clearly added an anti-white pre-requisite to the formula. To find projects with a “high social return” is a phrase almost directly out of the Chavez book of socialist agenda, referring to redirecting money along the lines of economic justice rather than economic stimulus.

To limit recipients to non-white, low-skilled “minorities” and “women” suggests an inherently discriminatory and even racist policy, which again is highly reminiscent of the policies that were intended to destroy the “Oligarchy” (what the Chavistas call the predominantly white middle and upper classes).

If this passage is indicative of the Democrat strategy, then we can infer that they will borrow trillions of dollars that will then be funneled to “minorities”, under the guise of “infrastructure investment”, even though by their own definition, they want to give money to the “long-term unemployed” (a key word for welfare recipients), which is not infrastructure. In short, this is a deception.

This looks suspiciously like reparations in disguise.

It is highway robbery of the middle class and industries who will have to repay the debt. And those long-term unemployed low-skilled workers are not the source of economic stimulus. This type of policy, providing free or cheap money to the poor so they can spend it, is precisely the kind of thinking that created the economic collapse to start with.

These redistributive theories are hauntingly similar to the populist strategies used by the Chavez regime to buy support in the short term, causing long-term and devastating economic results.

My hope now is that the Venezuelan community in the United States, with its first-hand knowledge of these kinds of policies and their deleterious effects on the society and economy, will speak and help to educate the American populace.

Otherwise, Americans may as well get used to the fact that we have just joined the ranks of the world’s banana republics.