REVEALED: Frank Luntz, GOP Message Maven, Publicly Boasts Wall Street Clients

Segami

(1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore

Fri Apr-23-10 09:26 AM
Original message

REVEALED: Frank Luntz, GOP Message Maven, Publicly Boasts Wall Street Clients

" DNC blasts Politico story challenging origin of GOP talking points

Under attack for authoring the Republican strategy to link financial reform legislation to "permanent bailouts" for Wall Street, Frank Luntz claims his widely-publicized memo was merely "defending economic freedom."

But the messaging guru appears to have a little-noticed ulterior motive � corporate clientele invested in scuttling the bill.

Luntz is founder, president and CEO of consulting firm Luntz, Maslansky Strategic Research, which boasts on its Web site of representing Wall Street clients such as Bank of America, Wachovia, Chase Card Services and UBS. The firms are among those lobbying to scuttle or water down Senate Democrats' financial reform package, which aims to regulate derivatives, complex financial products which are a key profit driver for large financial firms and played a role in the Wall Street meltdown of 2008.

While the striking similarities between Luntz's advice and the ensuing GOP plan of attack have been widely documented � and directly called out by the White House � numerous Republicans deny he was the originator of their "bailout" talking point, in Politico�s lead story Thursday.

"After hearing Republicans uniformly parroting Luntz talking points meant to falsely smear the bill verbatim before they had even read it, you don�t need a pollster to figure out how many people believe this story -- zero," DNC press secretary Hari Sevugan emailed Raw Story on Thursday, dismissing Republicans' claims that Luntz wasn't the source of their anti-reform message.

"If you buy this," added DNC communications director Brad Woodhouse, "I got some ocean front property to sell you in Arizona."

Luntz wrote in his 17-page document in January, "Frankly, the single best way to kill any legislation is to link it to the Big Bank Bailout."

<http://rawreplaymedia.com/media/2010/1002/TLFR.pdf>

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and GOP colleagues have often claimed in recent weeks that the bill "institutionalizes...taxpayer-funded bailouts of Wall Street banks."

The claim has been debunked by PolitiFact as "false" and rejected by the New York Times,

<http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2010/apr/20/mitch-mcconnell/bank-bailouts-not-bill-liquidation/>

which reports that " the bill would stop taxpayer-financed bailouts."

more

<http://rawstory.com/rs/2010/0423/gop-message-maven-publicly-boasts-wall-street-clients/>

Printer Friendly | Permalink | | Top

SpiralHawk

(1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore

Fri Apr-23-10 09:33 AM
Response to Original message

1. Typical republicon family values

Edited on Fri Apr-23-10 09:35 AM by SpiralHawk

...yet another humungous dump from the vast, bottomless republicon cesspool-of-the-soul to the public domain

Printer Friendly | Permalink | | Top

DU AdBot (1000+ posts)

Sun May 12th 2024, 10:23 AM
Response to Original message

Advertisements [?]

Top

Powered by DCForum+ Version 1.1 Copyright 1997-2002 DCScripts.com
Software has been extensively modified by the DU administrators

Important Notices: By participating on this discussion board, visitors agree to abide by the rules outlined on our Rules page. Messages posted on the Democratic Underground Discussion Forums are the opinions of the individuals who post them, and do not necessarily represent the opinions of Democratic Underground, LLC.