Wyden and Schumer Bailout for Uber, Airbnb, Oracle and Trump Shadows

“I pushed a button, and a car showed up, and now I’m a pimp,” Chief Executive Officer Travis Kalanick said four years ago.


https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2015-06-23/this-is-how-uber-takes-over-a-city
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News from the Guardian this morning:

"Chinese billionaires and the state of Oregon facilitated ventilator donations to New York to treat patients with Covid-19, as the pandemic accelerates toward a peak."

"In addition to the 1,000 ventilators obtained from China, Cuomo said Oregon loaned New York 140 ventilators."
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"It often pays to check who Trump is retweeting. John Solomon, it should be noted, is a columnist whose work for The Hill was used in attempts to smear opponents of the president during the Ukraine affair which led to Trump’s impeachment.

Trump has obviously been scrolling down Solomon’s profile page this morning:"

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"I don't think he's the devil — I support him and want him to do well," Ellison said.

https://www.businessinsider.com/larry-ellison-oracle-trump-support-2020-4

"Oracle is working with the US government to help find a treatment for COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus.

The cloud-computing giant set up a global crowdsourcing tool that will allow doctors and patients to record their responses after testing treatments."
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Oregon settles bitter legal fight with Oracle for $100 million

https://www.oregonlive.com/politics/2016/09/post_183.html

"Oregon took on Oracle Corp. and accused the company of fraud, filing false claims and racketeering. Four months before a trial was to get underway, Gov. Kate Brown settled the case Thursday"

"The settlement, valued at $100 million, includes cash payments to Oregon as well as a six-year license agreement for products and services that Brown said can be used to "significantly modernize state government's IT systems."

"Oracle's $100 million consists largely of technology. Only $25 million will come in the form of cash. And all of that will go to pay the state's legal fees and other costs."

"All in all, it's a far cry from the $240 million the state paid to Oracle for the failed Cover Oregon project. The company's army of IT experts worked for years on the exchange, repeatedly missed deadlines and never produced a functional exchange"

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"One of the lasting ironies of the settlement is that it could increase Oregon's reliance on the software company that was the chief author of the Cover Oregon disaster. "

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"In March, the California software giant filed a $33-million lawsuit citing press reports that the Kitzhaber campaign played a major role in managing the state's decision to shelve the $300 million Cover Oregon health insurance exchange project and use the federal website instead."

" Multnomah Circuit Court Judge Henry Kantor announced he'd decided to toss Oracle's case, agreeing with defendants' motion that their advice to Kitzhaber was protected by free speech. He did not lay out his reasoning in full, but said a detailed written opinion would follow.

In their motion, the Kitzhaber advisers cited Oregon's anti-SLAPP law, passed to protect against litigation intended only to silence critics, or a "strategic lawsuit against public participation."

The defendants, including McCaig and Kevin Looper, Scott Nelson, Tim Raphael and Mark Wiener, issued a statement Friday hailing the decision and calling the lawsuit "misguided and baseless."

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/03/27/airbnb-uber-lyft-unemployment/

"Uber drivers, Airbnb hosts could soon receive unemployment checks. Some call it a ‘bailout’ for big tech."

"“The unemployment insurance system, created during the Great Depression, is strikingly out-of-date and completely unequipped to deal with our current crisis,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), who helped craft the legislation, said before its passage."

“Companies are essentially getting a bailout because they won’t be paying unemployment insurance as a result,” said Veena Dubal, an associate professor at the University of California’s Hastings College of the Law who is an advocate for gig workers’ labor rights."

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https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2015-06-23/this-is-how-uber-takes-over-a-city


 “I pushed a button, and a car showed up, and now I’m a pimp,” Chief Executive Officer Travis Kalanick said four years ago.

"Charlie Hales, the mayor of Portland, Ore., was running a zoning hearing last December when he missed a call on his cell from David Plouffe, the campaign mastermind behind Barack Obama’s ascent.

 Although Hales had never met him, Plouffe left a voice mail that had an air of charming familiarity, reminiscing about the 2008 rally when 75,000 Obama supporters thronged Portland’s waterfront. “Sure love your city,” Plouffe gushed. “I’m now working for Uber and would love to talk.”

" Plouffe may be a big name, but Hales didn’t immediately call him back."

"The next day, City Hall heard from a local reporter that Uber cars would hit the streets that very evening. 

The company’s unauthorized kickoff put Hales in a bit of an artisanal pickle. Portland had just become the first city to explicitly allow short-term rentals through Airbnb and other sites"

"Over the past year, Uber built one of the largest and most successful lobbying forces in the country, with a presence in almost every statehouse.

 It has 250 lobbyists and 29 lobbying firms registered in capitols around the nation, at least a third more than Wal-Mart Stores. That doesn’t count municipal lobbyists. In Portland, the 28th-largest city in the U.S., 10 people would ultimately register to lobby on Uber’s behalf. "

"After a weekend of scrambling, the city sued Uber on Monday. Although Uber’s fines would eventually total $67,750, the city’s enforcement efforts evoked the Keystone Cops."

"Uber hired a new team of local lobbyists headed by Dan Bates, who used to work as Portland’s own lobbyist in the state capitol. Across the country, Uber’s lobbyists have similarly intimate connections.

 In Kansas, it hired Governor Sam Brownback’s former campaign manager and another lobbyist who also works for Koch Industries. In Connecticut, it contracted with a former House speaker’s firm, and in Illinois it brought on the former governor’s chief of staff."

"
Soon, Alpert’s phone rang. It was Mark Wiener, whom one local alt-weekly dubbed “The Man in the Shadows” and the “most powerful political consultant” in Portland. 

Wiener helped both Hales and Novick get elected and is known to work only with clients he thinks will win. Wiener said Uber wanted to know if Hales and Novick would consider a détente. Would they be open to a “conversation about a conversation?”

On a Saturday in mid-December, the two sides met at Wiener’s house. The mayor started by saying the conversation would go nowhere unless Uber stopped breaking the law. “He said it probably five times,” Alpert says.

 Uber’s Steger and Caitlin O’Neill, an in-house lobbyist who used to work as an organizer for criminal justice reform at the American Civil Liberties Union, apologized. “That was a huge point for the mayor and commissioner to hear,” Alpert says.

"To show drivers make livable wages, it introduced data from Princeton economist Alan Krueger, who served with Plouffe in the Obama administration, that found uberX drivers made more than $16 an hour (PDF)."

"The taxi industry and its supporters cried foul. One driver compared Uber to Enron because it “doesn’t play by the rules.”

"Records show the company had 19 in-person meetings with city officials in the first three months of the year, including one at the end of March, when Uber brought back the big gun, Wiener, to meet with Saltzman, the likely swing vote.

 Wiener had consulted on Saltzman’s past campaigns. All the meetings, combined with phone calls, meant Uber spoke with City Hall on average almost every other workday."

" Now on stage, Plouffe and Hales were all smiles. Hales teasingly tossed a copy of the negotiating bible Getting to Yes to Plouffe, a nod to Novick’s “we’ll throw the book at you!” threat."

Plouffe told the audience that playing nice in Portland isn’t necessarily a model elsewhere. 

“Maybe it is. Maybe it isn’t,” he said."


June 23, 2015, 3:06 PM PDT
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2015-06-23/this-is-how-uber-takes-over-a-city

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"Wyden is married to senior United States Senator for Oregon, Ron Wyden."

"After receiving her MBA from the University of Wisconsin and working briefly for Exxon, Nancy returned to New York City to work for her father at The Strand"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nancy_Bass_Wyden

New York, NY.

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"MARK WIENER IS A TOTAL ASSFUCKER," says a political insider, who has worked with Oregon's most powerful political consultant in the past.

"Unless the person who said that had his or her tongue firmly implanted in his or her cheek," Wiener responds, "I would say that's a great misapprehension of my role."

Wiener coached former legislative intern Beau Breedlove in early 2008, as allegations were first surfacing about his affair with Mayor Sam Adams. At this point, Adams was lying to Wiener and others about having had sex with Breedlove, and says his relationship with Wiener suffered when the scandal broke.

"Mark was mad," says Adams. "And he had a right to be, and to him went one of my first apologies."

Indeed, Wiener told Time magazine he had called Adams a "fucking moron" after the lies had been revealed, and that he was "pissed and saddened by it."

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"Wiener was born in Brooklyn, New York. He graduated in theater from Portland's Reed College in 1978, and went back to New York where he worked as an actor and cab driver.

 He worked six years for Assemblyman Chuck Schumer, who is now a US senator, before returning to Portland. Initially, Wiener worked for Kevin Mannix, back when Mannix was a Democrat. Eventually he landed a job working for then County Commissioner Dan Saltzman in 1993."