The Lucrative Liberal Business of Killing Health Care Reform – The New Republic

The Partnerships first tax filing, obtained this week by Andrew Perez of Maplight, details how the organization has embedded itself within a network of Democratic shit-hawking shops to conduct its work against health care reform. Its biggest vendor was consultancy Forbes Tate, whose relationship with the organization is well known: The Partnerships operations are run out of the firms office, according to Politico. Shaver is a partner at Forbes Tate; before that, she worked for Hillary Clintons 2016 campaign and Obamas Department of Health and Human Services. Forbes Tate received $1.7 million for this work last year, a third of the Partnerships total income. (We are not informed who donated to the Partnership, because it is a 501(c)(4).)

The second-biggest winner from the Partnerships activities: Bully Pulpit Interactive.* It has, according to its website, worked with clients ranging from the Democratic Party and Tammy Duckworths campaign to such society-ruining, law-flouting tech giants as Airbnb and Uber. In 2016, the firm was a major vendor for Hillary Clintons campaign, collecting more than $10 million for its work handling digital advertising and digital media buying for both the Hillary Clinton campaign and its joint fundraising organization with the Democratic National Committee. Bully Pulpit Interactives clients include some of the biggest center-left advocacy joints in town, including the American Civil Liberties Union, the Human Rights Campaign, Emilys List, and Everytown for Gun Safetythough these are just the clients it makes public. For some reason, its site doesnt list its work for the National Collegiate Athletic Association, a cartel dedicated to exploiting the labor of student-athletes, which was worth $12 million in 2017. Who knows what other clients the firm services but doesnt publicizeas it chose not to do for the Partnership? Thanks to our feeble transparency laws, it doesnt have to tell us. Public relations work doesnt count as lobbying for the purposes of lobbying disclosure rules.

The firm Seven Letter, formerly Blue Engine, made $140,000 off the Partnership last year. The Intercept reported that Seven Letter handled the Partnerships interactions with the media. Its staff includes prominent spin doctors such as Brendan Buck, who has previously worked for Paul Ryan and Americas Health Insurance Plans, and Adam Abrams, who used to work for the Obama White House. (If you long for a lost era of bipartisan comity, youll find it thriving on K Street.) According to a tax filing viewed at ProPublica, in 2014 Blue Engine worked for a group called Reforming Americas Taxes Equitably, a coalition of some of Americas biggest corporations that exists to push for lower corporate tax rates; it would go on to celebrate the 2017 Trump tax bill.

The New Republic asked Karthik Ganapathy, a former Bernie Sanders campaign staffer who recently founded MVMT Communications, which bills itself as primarying the consultant class: What is the deal with these firms? A lot of people come into politics to make peoples lives better, he said. Somewhere along the way, though, those folks get ground down by its institutions and start to understand that politics is a business just like any other, run by really rich folks who call the shots, and begin to see a lot of potential money on the table. So they start to work for and with people that the 25-year-old version of themselves would have thrown tomatoes atand thats just really sad to me. It is worthy of lament: Youll meet very few young people who moved to Washington for the purpose of feathering the nests of petrochemical corporations.

The pressure on all sides in this towninstitutional, ideological, financialto accept the broad status quo is immense; candidates who make a habit of challenging the established order are rare. Many of the firms that work for the Partnership were started by or staffed with former members of Obamas Yes, We Can brigade, with others going on to work for Amazon or Uber (or Theresa May). The ability of people who come to public service as righteous, justice-and-fairness-seeking liberals to transform themselves into dedicated laborers against the goals they once espoused is astounding, but every road in Washington is laid to funnel people toward that stupid, cynical end.

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The Lucrative Liberal Business of Killing Health Care Reform - The New Republic