Corruption Uber Alles

A big internal leak from Uber's high-flying days of bashing local governments brings up some unsavory associations. Plus, more on the internal turmoil of liberal-left advocacy.

The Guardian and the Washington Post are both highlighting revelations from a massive leak of more than 124,000 files including 83,000 emails, iMessages and WhatsApp messages from the top ranks of Uber from 2013-2017, a time when the famously aggressive ride-sharing company was expanding globally by fighting fiercely against government regulators in dozens of countries, including here in the US. The leak shows not just how Uber covertly used a variety of tech tools to thwart government oversight, most notably by using a “kill switch” based at company HQ in San Francisco to shut down live access to its computers in other countries whenever government regulators showed up in its offices seeking information, but also how much it also found willing collaborators happy to grease its expansion among high government officials like Emanuel Macron of France, who was then its economics minister. That fact may lead to a parliamentary investigation, since Macron is now the country’s president.

The leak also offers yet another example of the casually corrupt transactional politics of the elite circle that barreled its way to the top of the Democratic Party with Barack Obama’s election in 2008. I’m not going to recite here all the ways that Uber represents the worst years of the tech boom: the internal misogyny, the casual abuse of user privacy, the lying and hype about the supposed benefits to drivers, the slipshod oversight of driver qualifications and passenger safety, the systematic defiance of local laws. If you need a refresher, get ahold of Mike Isaac’s excellent book Super Pumped. What’s new here is how much top Uber officials, including David Plouffe, Obama’s 2008 campaign manager and White House political adviser, knew and participated in what the company was doing. According to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, which helped coordinate stories on the Uber files in forty countries, “To spread its message, Uber with the help of an advisory firm compiled lists of more than 1,850 ‘stakeholders,’ sitting and former public officials, think tanks and citizens groups, it intended to influence in 29 countries as well as European Union institutions, the documents show. Uber also recruited a battalion of former public officials, including many former aides to President Barack Obama. They appealed to public officials to drop probes, change policies on workers’ rights, draft new taxi laws and relax background checks on drivers.”

The leak came from Mark MacGann, Uber’s former top lobbyist in Europe, who told The Guardian he acted because the company had brazenly violated the law in dozens of countries and misled the public about the benefits of being an Uber driver. He said the ease with which Uber penetrated the highest echelons of power in countries such as the UK, France and Russia was “intoxicating” but also “deeply unfair” and “anti-democratic. He added, “I regret being part of a group of people which massaged the facts to earn the trust of drivers, of consumers and of political elites,” he said. “I should have shown more common sense and pushed harder to stop the craziness. It is my duty to [now] speak up and help governments and parliamentarians right some fundamental wrongs. Morally, I had no choice in the matter.”

MacGann’s remorse about his role shines in comparison to Plouffe, who was senior vice president of policy and strategy and board member for Uber from September 2014 through January 2017. In response to new leaks, Plouffe put out a statement saying his years at Uber were marked by a “very public, global and sometimes fierce debate about how and whether ride-sharing should be regulated. Sometimes those debates and negotiations were straightforward, sometimes they were more challenging, and sometimes there were people within the company who wanted to go too far,” he said. “I did my best to object when I thought lines would be crossed – sometimes with success, sometimes not.”

Plouffe’s statement is laughable. Given the role he continues to play as a top Democrat (he was a key adviser to Tara McGowan of ACRONYM, a Democratic media startup, and he is a long-serving member of the Obama Foundation board and a frequent commentator on MSNBC), the release of the Uber Files ought to dog his days. During the years Plouffe was with Uber, he played a central role in crafting and implementing its lobbying strategy. For example, in December 2015 ahead of a vote by the city council that would have allowed Uber drivers to unionize. Speaking at an event on the “Future of Work” at the local Impact Hub, Plouffe claimed an Uber union would be “flatly illegal” and argued that full-time Uber drivers made “a very good income,” without offering any specifics. Pressed for details by a local reporter for The Stranger, Plouffe hedged, saying, “We’re still a young company. We make mistakes. But we’re trying to learn from them.” At a June 2016 appearance at the University of Chicago, Plouffe claimed Uber was helping a huge number of people achieve economic security, declaring “If this was a government program, there would be parades thrown.”

To say now that Plouffe was an advocate for some group of angels inside Uber strains credulity. While the full trove of Uber Files haven’t been made public, here are some examples of Plouffe’s role that have surfaced. In December 2014, after an Uber driver in New Delhi with a past history of sexual assault allegations raped a female passenger, company leadership scrambled to shift blame from its flimsy background check program onto Indian authorities. The Indian Express reports that Plouffe was concerned the incident could damage Uber with regulators in many countries who were already raising questions about the fact that Uber drivers were unlicensed, unlike taxi operators. On December 11, six days after the incident, Plouffe wrote to his colleagues, “wondering if you are concerned — and it’s not directly connected to India but gives them more courage on the unlicensed argument especially — about any other cities/countries strengthening their arguments against us/taking action.” He also asks top Uber Managers: “Can you guys lay out other places where you think in light of India/reputation issues, you could see courts or regulators find a way or reason to shut us down.” In a December 23 email, Plouffe wrote, “Driver verification capabilities will be a necessity — we are exceedingly vulnerable there and only a matter of time before we have an incident (Chicago could be it, hope not) where that becomes a global problem for us.” The files do not shed light on whether Plouffe was aware of Uber’s infamous effort to obtain the rape victim’s medical records, which led to an invasion of privacy lawsuit that the company settled and later contributed to CEO Travis Kalanick’s downfall.

According to the Guardian, Plouffe tapped his Obama connections to lobby for Uber, sometimes with the help of fellow Obama campaign alum Jim Messina, one of the most politically flexible members of the Obama high command.

The leaked files show clearly how Uber sought help from US ambassadors known to both Plouffe and Messina to help smooth over relations in cities where Uber faced trouble. This made perfect sense – often the diplomats were big Obama donors. Dating back to 2014, Uber had seen sitting and former US government officials as key to its expansion plans, according to a leaked memo contained in the files that was titled “Leveraging the US government to support Uber’s international business.”

Examples of this ultra-transactional approach to cashing in abound. For example, The Guardian cites Plouffe writing in November 2015 then-US Ambassador to the UK Matthew Barzun, “I will be in London Dec 9 and 10. Any chance you could host the event you kindly suggested with influencers one of those days? Uber, Trump, Clinton etc lots to discuss … David.” The Guardian reports, “The embassy staff organised an event in December built around Plouffe giving a talk on the gig economy, and they invited the business minister Anna Soubry, the shadow business minister Kevin Brennan, influential MPs, government officials, journalists and business people.” Barzun, the husband of a Kentucky liquor heiress, had served as the national finance chair of the 2008 Obama campaign, and in his book The Audacity to Win, Plouffe credits him with the idea of tapping its grassroots base to hold low-dollar fundraising events that drove positive press coverage of the candidate.

The Guardian also reports that in France, “Plouffe was told in 2016 by MacGann that Uber needed the US ambassador to France, Jane Hartley, to ‘intervene’ on issues related to Uber’s rival Heetch. A former Uber official said the company’s outreach to Hartley reflected an effort to provide an ‘update on the business.’ When MacGann asked Messina in a leaked message that July if he had any messages for Hartley, one day before an appointment, Messina responded: ‘Tell her I love her,’ and later: ‘We did give her FRANCE.’” The files also show that Plouffe was fully in the loop on Uber’s use of the “kill switch” to thwart local regulators in France, and that he played an important role in the company’s efforts to court investments from several Russian oligarchs close to Vladimir Putin.

The Obama crowd likes to say his was the cleanest administration in modern history. To be sure, there were very few ethics scandals during Obama’s two terms compared to the wall-to-wall corruption of his successor, or the many scandals of the Bush and Clinton years. But when top political officials cash in on their connections, or worse, use them to bend public policy away from the public interest, the stink is plain. At a minimum, it’s high time people like Plouffe stopped putting themselves forward as “Democratic strategists” or “liberal commentators” representing the party or its values. Right now, every time he and the many other Obama officials who have gone into corporate buckraking show up on TV, they simply reinforce the perception that the party stands for little but crony capitalism. Though, frankly, maybe that’s all it these days: another vehicle for the wealthy and well-connected to leverage government for private gain.

Notes on Organizing, Continued

Ezra Klein and Michelle Goldberg had a fascinating conversation on his New York Times podcast last week about the future of women’s rights in the wake of the Dobbs decision that touched deftly on the ongoing debate about the turmoil inside liberal-left advocacy organizations. Here’s a chunk that caught my attention because of how much rings true:

Klein: I’ve been really struck myself talking to people inside the reproductive rights world who will, off the record, just tell you the entire, entire sector is in shambles, that the movement is completely consumed with internal politics in a way that has really deformed its external politics. And so I’m curious how you assess it. What has gone wrong there? And has what has gone wrong there actually mattered, or is that just kind of another problem somewhere else?

Goldberg: Well, I think it’s complicated… I don’t think that it’s all just kind of oversensitive millennials and members of Gen Z who have ridiculous demands. I think you have a problem on the left in general of a kind of ossified leadership, young people who are both frustrated and in some cases feel sort of hopeless. They feel like the opportunities or the possibilities for change in the world are being shut down.

And so you sort of turn inward, and you start trying to make change within or seek justice within your own organization. And it just doesn’t work. I mean, Jo Freeman wrote about this back in the ’70s in this great essay called “The Tyranny of Structurelessness” that wrote about how the feminist movement was kind of allergic to hierarchy. But in the effort to get rid of hierarchy, you just ended up empowering a lot of clique-iness and passive aggression disguised as politics, right.

You need, especially in a nonprofit organization, you need a degree of hierarchy and authority to function. And there needs to be a sense, the kind of legitimacy around the leadership. So at the same time, you know, look, I’m a person in my 40s. I probably would see it differently if I was 20 years younger.

There were demands that kind of younger people make, both about how organizations are supposed to function internally that are, I think, a little bit stupefying for older people who kind of aren’t used to thinking of the workplace for good or ill as being a place that is supposed to provide people with a whole bunch of emotional support and validations.

And then there are kind of, I think, substantive differences, especially around language. I mean, I can tell you that most women I know over 40 seethe at the word “women” being taken out of reproductive rights activism. I mean, I can’t tell you how many conversations I have with people about this who are just so angry about it, because it feels to them like feminism has become another place where cisgender women are supposed to defer and kind of back off and be self-effacing, and worry about other people’s problems. It drives people really crazy.

And these aren’t people — I mean, I’m not going to say whether or not they’re transphobic. That’s not my determination to make. But I can say that these are people who definitely would oppose bathroom bills, right, would oppose laws that try to stop young people from transitioning, that would probably support their own kids transitioning under some circumstances, and that would take a sort of more watchful waiting attitude under other circumstances, you know, but definitely believe that it has a place.

Everybody I know kind of know knows people who have kids who are either transitioning or nonbinary, and maybe they’re confused by that. But they’re not hostile to it. But there is a sense, I think, among a lot of older women that if you can’t explain the way that abortion bans are rooted in misogyny, that they’re rooted in the kind of fundamental desire to control women’s reproduction, then it becomes very difficult to organize, right.

Like, ‘some people oppress other people on the basis of their reproduction’ is just not really an accurate way, I think, of describing centuries of patriarchy.

Klein: Something that makes me think a bit about is, I think there’s a difference between seeing your output as an organization, as a staffer at an organization, as being built around organizing, and the various goals and measures you might look at to see if your organizing is successful, and being about purity, organizational communications, organizational stance, right.

I think there’s a difference between seeing your success inside an organization, being how many people have you added to it, versus how much have you made it a bolder, more thoroughly liberal or radical, or however you might define it, organization.

And one thing I have seen across a lot of dimensions of the left in the past couple of years is that for all that people on the left get attacked for wanting safe spaces, actual left organizing spaces feel incredibly unsafe to the people in them. And the number of people who are going to persevere through that, who are going to go and sit in on a bunch of meetings, and be part of an organization where they’re terrified they’re going to say the wrong thing; where they feel like they’re going to get jumped on; where they feel like if they have some disagreements — if they’re there for one reason and they have disagreements with people on another, that they’re going to be made into the enemy in the room.

I think people don’t always love talking about this, but there’s also just an ongoing howl from within these movements of people who feel very turned off within them. And I almost never meet anybody who really denies this. It’s more just considered unhelpful to talk about too much publicly. But there is this tension between organizing for purity and organizing for numbers.

And one thing that seems to me to have happened to a lot of groups is either they’re not really organizing at all, or to the extent they are, they’re organizing for purity under a theory that will create enthusiasm that gets them numbers. And that theory is just not bearing out.

Odds and Ends

--Say hello to Democracy Dinners, a new effort from a cross-partisan group of organizers including Joan Blades, co-founder of MoveOn, to get Americans talking to each other across the political divide.

--Speaking of democracy, Michael Tomasky has a useful take in The New Republic on what we should learn from the successful effort of the citizens of Croydon, New Hampshire, who beat back an effort by a local libertarian activist to radically cut its school budget. I remember when the Croydon vote took place, because someone in my Westchester "Teach the Truth" network (which sprouted up to fight the anti-masking, anti-CRT mob across the county) had shared the story after the town initially voted to slash education funding in half. Joni Mitchell was kind of right--we won't know what we've got til it's gone. On the other hand, one libertarian ideologue just did Croydon a favor. Now there's an active group there wide awake to the challenge coming from the right, which did a very effective job of organizing the pro-public school side. Now just imagine if Democrats did this on a regular basis -- organize locally to defend and uplift public goods! (Instead of taking big bucks jobs lobbying to undermine them.)

—A note to readers: The Connector is taking next week off to do some beach reading. Hope you do too!