A Harvard Law School buddy of President Barack Obama while both served on the Harvard Law Review, he has a highly advanced grasp of new media, the Internet and technological innovation, with strategic goals to push America far to the left.

Julius Genakowski:

Julius Genakowski is profiled at www.WhoRunsGov.com

BACKGROUND

An old friend and basketball buddy of President Barack Obama: a year younger (born in 1962), he is the son of Eastern European Jewish immigrants who fled the Holocaust. He was raised in Great Neck, on Long Island, and educated in New York City. He earned his undergraduate degree at Columbia University (1985, history, magna cum laude), where he was an editor of the Columbia Daily Spectator. (Obama had graduated from Columbia two years earlier - without honors - but the two did not know each other at Columbia.)

Out of undergraduate, Genachowski worked on Capitol Hill as an aide to then-Rep. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.).

Genachowski attended Harvard Law School (1989-1991), was a classmate with Barack Obama, and served as notes editor on the Harvard Law Review when it was headed by Obama. The two took breaks playing basketball, and became close friends. Genachowski told the Washington Post, "We were two guys with funny names, and our backgrounds, while different, shared some important features that brought us together," he said. "My parents were immigrants, and we have our share of Holocaust stories. So we shared an appreciation that people with backgrounds like his and mine could end up at a place like Harvard, where we never expected to be."

Genachowski and Obama graduated Harvard Law magna cum laude together in 1991, attended each other’s weddings, and have remained close friends.

After law school, Genachowski’s career took the Washington path. He first clerked for federal appeals court judge Abner Mikva (U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit), taking a job that Obama turned down (Mikva had arranged a job for Obama at the Chicago law firm he headed before being appointed a federal judge).  

Genachowski subsequently clerked for two Supreme Court justices, David Souter and William Brennan Jr.

In 1994, during the Clinton administration, Genachowski served under two Federal Communications Commission heads: Reed Hundt and William Kennard - stints as adviser and general counsel

In 1998, he left government for the private sector, as Chief of Business Operations and a member of billionaire Barry Diller's Office of the Chairman at IAC/InterActiveCorp (which made him a multi-millionaire). He had previously served on the Boards of Directors of Expedia, Hotels.com and Ticketmaster.

He founded two D.C.-based venture capital firms, Rock Creek Ventures and LaunchBox Digital. He was also a special advisor at General Atlantic and a member of the Boards of Directors at The Motley Fool, Web.com, Mark Ecko Enterprises, and Beliefnet. He was appointed to the board of JackBe in April 2006.

He serves as a board member of Common Sense Media, a leading organization seeking to improve the media lives of children and families; and as an advisory board member of Environmental Entrepreneurs (E2). He also helped found the New Resource Bank, the country’s first commercial "green bank."

POLITICS

Genachowski began working on a huge government reform plan in 2007, when he chaired the Technology, Media and Telecommunications policy task force that created the Obama Technology and Innovation Plan. He urged Obama to harness the power of the Internet in the 2008 presidential campaign, to create social networking tools on the Internet so voters could rally for Obama’s causes, an element of the campaign that was inventive and successful. Candidate Obama adopted his friend's plan in unprecedented ways that will reverberate throughout future political bids.

After Obama won the election, Genachowski co-led the Technology, Innovation, and Government Reform Group for Obama’s presidential transition team, working closely with transition leader John Podesta, who was on leave from the Soros-funded Democrat think tank, Center for American Progress, which was also working on Obama’s media control plans.

In June 2007, Podesta's group published a crucial social-change document titled, The Structural Imbalance of Political Talk Radio. One of the seven co-authors was Mark Lloyd, employed by John Podesta as a Senior Fellow (2004-2008) on communications issues in his Center. The document's authors complained that media ownership was dominated by conservatives, which gave conservative talk shows an unfair advantage over progressive talk. It recommended new regulations that were vigorously opposed by media companies.  Lloyd and his six coauthors wanted to cap the number of radio stations owned by a single company. They noted that 91 percent of the weekday talk-radio programming supported by the top five commercial station-owners in the U.S. is conservative. The coauthors wanted government to force progressive talk onto the air, requiring radio stations to broadcast large amounts of "local community content" that would crowd out conservative talk; they wanted to force "local accountability" rules on stations for renewing licenses, so they could orchestrate public disapproval from their activist constituency to kill licenses. When Genachowski later selected Lloyd as FCC Media Diversity Officer, the report became an issue.

POWER

On March 3, 2009, Genachowski was announced as President Obama’s nominee to head the Federal Communications Commission as Chairman. The first piece of business Genachowski was supposed to deal with when he stepped into the FCC was the digital television conversion. But his confirmation was delayed until June, and by then the switch had already occurred.

On June 16 Genachowski sailed through his confirmation hearing in the Senate Commerce. Science and Transportation Committee, won unanimous confirmation by the whole Senate on the 25th, and took the oath of office June 29 for a 5-year term.

So, Obama had an old friend who had managed his hi-tech online presidential campaign now running the FCC – with intimate knowledge of the campaign’s activist Internet responders and email list. If used by a grassroots expert, that information was powerful enough to generate pressure on the agency to do whatever the president wanted.

  COMBAT WITH CORPORATIONS

In May 2010, Genachowski released a proposal to overhaul the FCC’s ability to regulate broadband Internet. Genachowski’s plan is to redefine Internet providers under the category of “telecommunication services,” and enforce six rules that currently apply to phone companies. The new, “third-way” plan is in response to a federal court ruling that limited the FCC’s ability to regulate the Internet. The new classification is an attempt to regain that authority.

THE MEDIA DIVERSITY CZAR FLAP

To put the Obama campaign’s activist Internet responders and email list into use as a policy tool, Genachowski created the position of Media Diversity Officer in the FCC. It was supposedly in response to the Obama stimulus bill passed in February 2009. Congress appropriated $7.2 billion for increased broadband coverage throughout the U.S., which included expanding use in rural and low-income areas often populated by minorities. But there was nothing in the bill that suggested the creation of an FCC Diversity Officer.

However, such an office was essential to Genachowski's larger strategic goals, even though he had to combine the Media Diversity Officer job with an Associate Counsel position in order to fit into the existing bureaucracy. That meant finding a sharp attorney who shared the Obama administration's leftward beliefs. The natural choice to fill the combined posts was Mark Lloyd, a lawyer with deep media experience, whom John Podesta had employed (2004-2008) as a Senior Fellow on communications issues in his Center for American Progress.

See Mark Lloyd's profile here.

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