HOW DAVID PLOUFFE AND HIS TEAM OF BRIBERY EXPERTS LAUNDER POLITICAL CASH
Posted on Tuesday 02 July 2019, - - updated on 26/11/19 - NEWS - Permalink
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David Plouffe and ‘The Same-Old Game Playing in Washington.’
- Plouffe was key in staging the Department of Energy as a political slush-fund to pay off campaign financiers
- Plouffe is "the Roger Stone" of 2020
- Plouffe's hero seems to be Sid Blumenthal
- A Master of "Deny, Deflect and Delay Tactics" and he taught them to Zuckerberg and Sandberg for Congressional hearings
Pick out the more surprising news here:
1) David Plouffe, a senior White House adviser who was President Obama’s 2008 campaign manager, accepted a $100,000 speaking fee in 2010 from an affiliate of a company doing business with Iran’s government.
2) David Plouffe gets $50,000 per speech.
As the Post reports:
Since Plouffe’s speeches, MTN Group has come under intensified scrutiny from U.S. authorities because of its activities in Iran and Syria, which are under international sanctions intended to limit the countries’ access to sensitive technology. At the time of Plouffe’s speeches, MTN had been in a widely reported partnership for five years with a state-owned Iranian telecommunications firm.
There were no legal or ethical restrictions on Plouffe being paid to speak to the MTN subsidiary as a private citizen. But for a close Obama aide to have accepted payment from a company involved in Iran could prove troublesome for the president as the White House toughens its stance toward the Islamic republic. In recent weeks, Republican presidential contender Mitt Romney has accused the administration of being soft on Iran.
If you want to argue that the Obama administration’s policies towards Iran are soft because of a speech that David Plouffe gave in 2010 to a South African company, you can go ahead and do that. I think the simpler explanation is that President Obama is the man who declared in a Democratic presidential debate that he was willing to meet with Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad without preconditions. This is not a man with gut-level revulsion for the Iranian regime, which announced its worldview and intent to the world by taking Americans hostage and parading them before television cameras, which spent the following decades becoming the preeminent state sponsor of terror and blew up 19 U.S. Airmen in Khobar Towers in 1996. President Obama is a man who really does believe, or did believe, that America and Iran could “get past” previous acts of mass murder and come to a peaceful agreement.
No, the bigger story out of the Plouffe speeches is that President Obama, who campaigned so passionately against what he called the “revolving door” between the highest levels of government and the lobbying/influence business, has absolutely no problem with it when his friends do it.
The White House assures us that Plouffe merely went to speak to the company about “mobile technology and digital communications.” It was merely his technical expertise, and not his connection to the president, that spurred MTN Group to spend $100,000, and probably about $5,000-$10,000 on air fare (how likely is it that Plouffe flew coach, or had many layovers?) and more on lodging.
Now, how many speeches are worth $110,000 to a company? What could President Obama’s 2008 campaign manager have to say about “mobile technology and digital communications” that would create $110,000 in value to a telecommunications company?
Perhaps Plouffe really is that smart. Or perhaps what made him worth the expense was his relationship to the president – and perhaps MTN Group, like many large international business, felt it would be good to have friends in high places. Friends in high places are often for sale once the campaigns end or they leave government work. It’s all legal, both sides do it, and attempting to ban it would probably create more problems than it would solve. (For example, former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle provides “strategic advice on public policy matters” to a law firm that is one of the most powerful lobbyists in Washington, but he insists that he does not lobby.)
Government work and campaign work often don’t pay very well. But those who choose that path can develop relationships with powerful people – and thus, once a campaign or government worker has built up enough solid relationships with powerful lawmakers, they can cash in on the decades of effort with highly-compensated “totally not a lobbyist” jobs like Daschle’s, or through extremely well-compensated speaking gigs like Plouffe. Again, both sides do it.
But as a candidate, Obama explicitly and loudly denounced this phenomenon, and he ran ads on it: “The chairman of the committee who pushed the law through went to work for the pharmaceutical industry, making $2 million a year. Imagine that! That’s an example of the same-old game playing in Washington. I don’t want to play the game better, I want to put an end to the game-playing.”
Of course, since then, we’ve seen this bold opposition and determination reach its expiration date. This was one of the first promises that PolitiFact declared explicitly “broken”:
Obama’s ethics proposals specifically spelled out that former lobbyists would not be allowed to “work on regulations or contracts directly and substantially related to their prior employer for two years.” On his first full day in office, Obama signed an executive order to that effect. But the order has a loophole — a “waiver” clause that allows former lobbyists to serve. That waiver clause has been used at least three times, and in some cases, the administration allows former lobbyists to serve without a waiver. After examining the administration’s actions for the past two months, we have concluded that Obama has broken this promise.
More than 40 lobbyists served or serve in top-level positions within the Obama administration.
Top lobbyists are among those who visit the White House most frequently. And we’ve seen that in order to avoid meetings with lobbyists showing up in the White House logs, Obama staffers meet with them at the Caribou Coffee just down the street from the White House. There’s your reform, lobbyists; under Obama, the staffers come closer to you.
Obama proudly declares he doesn’t accept donations from lobbyists… so the lobbyists give to the DNC, which runs ads on behalf of Obama.
President Obama is very pleased with a slipshod illusion of reform. Deals like MTN Group’s one with Plouffe reveal what he really thinks of “the same-old game playing in Washington.”
CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: David Plouffe, a senior White House adviser who was President Obama’s 2008 campaign manager, accepted a $100,000 speaking fee in 2010 from an affiliate of a company doing business with Iran’s government.
Plus: “No, the bigger story out of the Plouffe speeches is that President Obama, who campaigned so passionately against what he called the ‘revolving door’ between the highest levels of government and the lobbying/influence business, has absolutely no problem with it when his friends do it.”
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SELLING FAKE NEWS AND MEDIA MANIPULATION AS A SERVICE TO MANIPULATE STOCK TRADING BY GETTING INSIDERS ELECTED
- Operatives who worked for former White House character assassination ops are spearheading websites designed to mimic journalism outfits in an effort to push Silicon Valley oligarch positions.
- One of the founders behind the websites says media pundits should dispel of the idea of objective reporting and instead should push out Eric Schmidt's ideological talking points that look like journalism.
- The websites they are creating come on the heels of a misinformation campaign to troll outsiders during elections
A small cadre of former "journalists" and Gawker-like operatives are creating a Russian-style propaganda outfit designed to mimic real local news and activate the stupider voters ahead of the 2020 election.
Tara McGowan, a digital producer for Obama for America in 2011, is raising $25 million from wealthy liberals to create a media company called Courier Newsroom that is designed to deliver information favorable to Democrats. Courier is rolling out newspapers in swing states to counter what McGowan believes is right-wing spin on Facebook and across the digital domain.
Courier Newsroom does not alerts readers that the publication is actually a liberal project. The project’s primary mission is to craft content that can travel quickly throughout the social media ecosphere, according to a Bloomberg Businessweek report Monday. McGowan launched similar outlets earlier this year for similar purposes, the report notes.
She put together the Virginia Dogwood and Arizona’s Copper Courier, among others that are expected to roll out in Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin, all battleground states. The Dogwood publishes articles that appear to be local in an effort to help develop trust among readers in the area.
McGowan said the idea is to fill the areas where local news outlets are disappearing. She is also the proprietor of a nonprofit group called Acronym that will spend $75 million on digital ads to rebut what Democrats believe is President Donald Trump’s insurmountable edge in battleground states.
She explained to Bloomberg Businessweek how her operations work and what kind of information they can extract from readers.
“Everybody who clicks on, likes, or shares an article … we get that data back to create a lookalike audience to find other people with similar attributes in the same area. So we continually grow our ability to find people,” McGowan, a former journalist who worked for CBS News, told reporters.
News media have changed dramatically and objective journalism no long exists, she added.
“A lot of people I respect will see this media company as an affront to journalistic integrity because it won’t, in their eyes, be balanced,” McGowan noted. “What I say to them is, Balance does not exist anymore, unfortunately.” She added: “We’re losing the information war to verified liars pouring millions of dollars into Facebook.”
Another alum of former President Barack Obama’s campaigns is joining her agenda. David Plouffe, who managed Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, recently joined Acronym’s board.
“There’s a lot of truth to Tara’s critique,” Plouffe told reporters. “Strategy-wise, we’re still stuck in the last decade. So many of the problems in our country I trace back to the strength of the conservative distribution network — on TV, but especially, as Trump showed, online. Democrats have never been able to get velocity there.”
Other members of the media are saying similar things.
“Journalism has collapsed faster than the steel industry in the United States,” Nicco Mele, a former executive at the Los Angeles Times, told reporters. Mele joined the Courier Newsroom’s board of directors and believes McGowan’s work could help journalists weather a “former-alarm fire for the future of democracy in this country.”
Media executives are tinkering with other ways to make money using fiercely partisan content. Former Fox News executive Ken LaCorte, for instance, got into trouble for reportedly operating a series of websites edited by Macedonians that were designed to stoke viral content.
LaCorte founded Conservative Edition News, a repository of stories that carry headlines with click-bait headlines, which stoke emotional reactions, The News York Times reported on Nov. 21. He also created Liberal Edition News, which feeds readers content guaranteed to poke and prod liberal voters even further to the left.
LaCorte’s website sites mimicked Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election, when Russian operatives used sock puppet accounts and to foment discord across the digital divide over highly divisive issues like Black Lives Matter, among others. Russia’s Internet Research Agency was responsible for creating fake personas on Facebook, Twitter and else where to troll American votes.
Facebook nixed LaCorte’s pages after The NYT and other researchers asked about his business. The move effectively shut off LaCorte’s money-maker — 90% of his income was gone overnight, according to The NYT. Democratic operatives meanwhile worked to craft Facebook pages and Twitter accounts to troll conservative voters ahead of a 2017 election.
Operatives created a “Dry Alabama” Facebook page with a blunt message attached: Alcohol is evil and should be prohibited, media reports show from January show. The page included images of car wrecks and ruined families. Its contents were targeted at business conservatives who are inclined to oppose prohibition. They were trying to disrupt Judge Roy Moore’s 2017 special election senatorial campaign.
Neither Plouffe nor McGowan have responded to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment through the Acronym website. They have not yet answered questions about the ethical problems associated with producing journalistic content without mentioning the true design of the group behind the site.
David Plouffe told people that he wanted to frighten that he had reporter Micheal Hastings killed. ( Michael Hastings (journalist) - Wikipedia )
The campaign trail really sucks. Or does it? In an exclusive excerpt from Panic 2012: The Sublime and Terrifying Inside Story of President Obama's Final Campaign, Michael Hastings explores the weirdly addictive qualities of most expensive election in history, the "brutal caste system" of the press corps, and how the White House Press Secretary picked up a dangerous $10,000-a-day habit. Hastings said of Plouffe, before his death "...David Plouffe had reportedly accepted $100,000 for two speeches in Nigeria in December 2010. (Was that political money laundering for Obama? )Few media types or reporters could command such sums. More generously, the temptation to see what it was really like on the other side was huge, though I did recall one writer’s comment that after 50 years in Washington, he’d never been offered a job . . . Okay, I’d do it—I stood up and . . . Ack! A correspondent from Time got to him first. The correspondent had Carney’s old job, and they stood around laughing at some inside joke. How could I compete with a Time-on-Time reunion? Okay, Psaki— No, she’d been swarmed, and it looked like she was about to be called up on a press riser to do a cable interview hit. Axelrod was also busy, signing autographs and posing for pictures. The last time I talked to Axelrod—at the one sit-down he gave me and two others from BuzzFeed in April—I didn’t get the impression he particularly wanted to talk to me. It followed coverage in which I had described him as a guru figure whose assistants helped him manage his Twitter account. He’d had his people try to get me to take out the references to this after the story was published, and he never replied to my e-mails again. Plouffe had bolted back behind the tents...." "... "As Obama talked, I wandered around the event site, still hoping to make an introduction to a senior campaign official—Carney was off-limits, chilling in the air-conditioning; Psaki again seemed extremely busy. Then I saw Plouffe, in the parking lot behind the barrier, where he was talking to another journalist I vaguely recognized. I walked up, listening in on the interview, likely breaching etiquette. “This is real, this is what he’s going to do,” Plouffe was saying. “It’s all connected to jobs.” After she finished asking what seemed to be her final question, I introduced myself. “David, just wanted to introduce myself. Michael Hastings from—” “Hey, good to see you,” he said, then turned around and walked away. Hmm. ..."
"...Why hadn’t I even gotten a “no comment”? Or a “fuck you”? Or “Sorry, you’re never in your life going to get an interview with me or the vice president, or anyone else”? With Carney there was also the unsettling feeling that I was looking directly at a regime collaborator. I’d seen what they’d done to collaborators in Iraq—ski-masked assassinations at the marketplace—or to Cylons on Battlestar Galactica or snitches on the South Side—bang, bang..."
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