The American presidential candidate John McCain has a problem:
The man picked by the John McCain campaign to run the 2008 Republican National Convention resigned Saturday after a report that his lobbying firm used to represent the military regime in Myanmar. [aka Burma]
and
Doug Davenport, the regional campaign manager for the mid-Atlantic states, founded the DCI Group's lobbying practice and oversaw the contract with Myanmar in 2002. "Doug has tendered his resignation and we have accepted it," Jill Hazelbaker, McCain's communications director, wrote in a e-mail. ( Atlantic.com)
The lobby firm behind the person Doug Goodyear, the DCI group is for us, although we reside across the Atlantic, a well-known propaganda firm with strong ties to the right wing of the US-republican party. It participated as an organiser of the Bush-Cheney presidential campaign and is a known astroturfing specialist with slanderous communication tactics. In the selection of its present and past clients it was not very selective. Among them Exxon, Tobacco and Microsoft. All this is generally known including the Washington representation for the rogue regime in Burma.
In Europe DCI runs a network of think tanks and it took responsibility for the weird journo-lobbying website TechCentralStation that spread hate propaganda against the French government, the EU, Muslims and also issued offensive slanderous communication against the FFII, the community that backs <no>OOXML and sided against Microsoft in its EU software patents lobby campaign.
The group is waging an ideological continuation of Karl Marx's crusade against capitalism and private property. … The people who run FFII are enemies of private property, the free-market and capitalism… Why should Europeans let the FFII create a world in which innovators are exploited by pirates and plagiarizers? Rather, we should give Hartmut Pilch, the FFII president, the same advice as George Bush gave to Michael Moore in Fahrenheit 9/11: "Go get a real job!"
Many observers were shocked about the sillyness of the DCI propaganda machine that was totally unable to adapt to European discourse standards.
More on sourcewatch:
Microsoft’s decision to hire DCI came as the company faced an antitrust lawsuit from the U.S. Justice Department in the 1990s. By 2000, Microsoft was spending millions of dollars on contributions to Republican and Democratic campaign war chest, think tanks, and ostensibly independent trade associations as well as on payments to high-powered lobbyists, public relations, and political operatives. Hoping to sway public opinion and the opinion of state and federal officials, the software giant built up a wide network of supporters, with its sponsorship of those groups mostly invisible to the public.
Also ACT lobbyist Jonathan Zuck was involved with DCI, sourcewatch again:
Americans for Technology Leadership was founded by Jonathan Zuck in 1999 as a "grassroots" organisations for concerned consumers who want less regulation in the technology sector. … ATL's domain name, techleadership.org, is registered to the Association for Competitive Technology. The site is hosted by Thomas E. Stock and Thomas J. Synhorst's LLC, TSE Enterprises. Synhorst is a founding member of the DCI Group, a Washington DC-based strategic consulting and lobbying firm which has counted Microsoft as a prime client for a number of years. … According to the Times, the campaign was discovered when Utah's Attorney General at the time Mark Shurtleff received letters "purportedly written by at least two dead people … imploring him to go easy on Microsoft Corp. for its conduct as a monopoly."
Here for instance an ATL (Jim Prendergast) opinion article:
Foxnews: Massachusetts Should Close Down OpenDocument
The technology trades, blogs and industry are buzzing about a monumental policy shift in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Officials in the state have proposed a new policy that mandates that every state technology system use only applications designed around OpenDocument file formats …, the policy represents an attack on market-based competition, which in turn will hurt innovation. The state has a disaster in the making.
In DCI's journo-lobbying online-magazine TechCentralStation Jonathan Zuck was interviewed by Craig Winneker of TCS:
CW: [Las time Gates visited Brussels he got a pie in the face]. And this time, it was kind of figurative pie in the face because as soon as he [Bill Gates] left, the European Parliament starts shooting down software patents. I mean, is there any point to this or
JZ: Well, software patents is the really important battle that we've got on the horizon. And I think that Microsoft is right to continue to use all means of negotiation and just presence in these debates. You know, I don't think any one of them is going to be the magic bullet or the ultimate blunder. I think that it's an ongoing and continuous discussion that needs to happen with European governments and I think they're looking to starting to do. So I think that's the right strategy. I just don't think anything is going to happen over night. … I think as it becomes a more global corporation, then there's more of an understanding that what's good for Microsoft is good for Europe.
Note: DCI group's work for the Myramar regime was well known in advance to everyone. Why does it really need a scandal and a political context to cut relations with 'mucky pups' of the lobby scene. DCI group is not only unbearable because it defended the interests of the Burma rogue regime in Washington but also because it did interfere in internal matters of foreign nations, e.g. in the EU on behalf of American clients. European stakeholders were not amused about DCI's covert operations and slander communication.