Reply #49: I don't know why...

[stillcool]

but every time I read about a Clinton email/smear mail campaign I think of this guy....

Clintons' InfoUSA Ties Scrutinized
by Peter Overby
Last year, New York Sen. Hillary Clinton took the unusual step of renting out some of her lists. The transaction once again highlights the Clintons' connections to a businessman who now faces questions from the Securities and Exchange Commission.
*Reports from Clinton's campaign show that on Dec. 3, it collected payment for renting out three mailing lists, the sale of which netted them $8,225.It was an unusual transaction, according to Roger Craver, a liberal guru of the political direct-mail industry.

*According to one direct-mail professional, $800,000 would have seemed like a more plausible price for a quality list...
Vin Gupta has a long history of giving and raising campaign money for the Clintons, and gave $1 million for the 2000 Millennium Celebration, a New Year's Party thrown by the Clintons.
*After the Clintons left the White House, Gupta hired Bill Clinton as a consultant. It's one of two continuing business relationships he has had since leaving office, and it has been worth $3.3 million, in addition to the options on 100,000 shares of stock.
*The corporate spending on behalf of the Clintons helped fuel a shareholder lawsuit against Gupta and 10 corporate directors.
*There are plenty of other allegations in the suit about homes, cars, and a yacht for Gupta. A Delaware chancery court judge dismissed some of the allegations involving the Clintons. But the case is still proceeding. It has led to an informal inquiry by the Securities and Exchange Commission, which is also asking if Gupta misspent corporate funds.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=18958566

Clinton Backer’s Ties to Powerful Cut Both Ways
Mr. Gupta, who arrived in Nebraska from India in 1967, was unusually successful in working his way into the Democratic fold, to the point where he found himself sleeping in the Clinton White House, vacationing with the former president and appointing the Democratic chairman, Terry McAuliffe, to the board of one of his companies. He gave consulting contracts worth $3 million to Mr. Clinton, and recently hired the son of Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Because of those close links with Democrats, he stirred conflict-of-interest questions by buying a company that does presidential polling for CNN.
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*Some of the benefits to Mr. Gupta are tangible. The Democrats paid infoUSA $5 million over the last six years for computer consulting and data services (the Republicans paid it $6 million for data), and the company was granted the rights to resell lists of donors to the Democratic Party, as well as to Mrs. Clinton’s Senate campaign, Mr. Clinton’s presidential library and the Clintons’ legal defense fund.
Other benefits are harder to quantify. Mr. Gupta estimates that just being seen with Mr. Clinton, and paying him to speak at company events, has yielded millions of dollars in new business. Testifying in civil suits involving his businesses, Mr. Gupta has impressed juries with tales of how the former president has nominated him for diplomatic posts, appointed him to the board of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington and accompanied him to India, trial transcripts show.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/14/us/politics/14gupta.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2

Bilking the Elderly, With a Corporate Assist
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/20/business/20tele.html?

Richard Guthrie, 92, was tricked into giving banking data to telephone callers, who then stole money from his account, investigators say.
By CHARLES DUHIGG
*InfoUSA advertised lists of “Elderly Opportunity Seekers,” 3.3 million older people “looking for ways to make money,” and “Suffering Seniors,” 4.7 million people with cancer or Alzheimer’s disease. “Oldies but Goodies” contained 500,000 gamblers over 55 years old, for 8.5 cents apiece. One list said: “These people are gullible. They want to believe that their luck can change.
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Many of the victims are people like Mr. Guthrie, whose name was among the millions that infoUSA sold to companies under investigation for fraud, according to regulators. Scam artists stole more than $100,000 from Mr. Guthrie, his family says. How they took much of it is unclear, because Mr. Guthrie’s memory is faulty and many financial records are incomplete.
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The list brokering industry has existed for decades, primarily serving legitimate customers like magazine and catalog companies. InfoUSA, one of the nation’s largest list brokers and a publicly held company, matches buyers and sellers of data. The company maintains records on 210 million Americans, according to its Web site. In 2006, it collected more than $430 million from clients like Reader’s Digest, Publishers Clearinghouse and Condé Nast.
But infoUSA has also helped sell lists to companies that were under investigation or had been prosecuted for fraud, according to records collected by the Iowa attorney general. Those records stemmed from a now completed investigation of a suspected telemarketing criminal.
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Records also indicate that infoUSA sold thousands of other elderly Americans’ names to Windfall Investments after the F.B.I. had accused the company in 2002 of stealing $600,000 from a California woman.
Between 2001 and 2004, infoUSA also sold lists to World Marketing Service, a company that a judge shut down in 2003 for running a lottery scam; to Atlas Marketing, which a court closed in 2006 for selling $86 million of bogus business opportunities; and to Emerald Marketing Enterprises, a Canadian firm that was investigated multiple times but never charged with wrongdoing.

http://www.infousa.com/


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