A Quick Trip to India

From the Herald Leader:

After a quick trip to India, Gov. Steve Beshear said Wednesday he has signed a deal with a New Delhi company that will build a $150 million factory in Elizabethtown that could employ up to 250 people within three years.

Beshear said Uflex Ltd., which manufactures flexible packaging materials, will receive state tax incentives, which the Kentucky Economic Development Finance Authority tentatively approved Wednesday morning.

Now this gives me a little heartburn, because I think politicians, particularly a sitting Governor should know who they are getting in bed with.

The Chairman of the Board for Uflex Ltd. Ashok Chaturvedi, is the guy on the left. Mr. Chaturvedi says in his vision statement that “So across the world, you will find dealing with us as comfortable as with your local partner, yet backed with the formidable technological know-how of global players.”

Well I’m not comfortable because Chaturvedi just got 4 years in the slammer for a land deal. Sounds like the kind of guy I’d trust with $20 million in tax breaks.

From The Times of India:

GHAZIABAD: For the first time in India, a state chief secretary has been convicted and jailed. A CBI special court on Tuesday held ex-UP chief secretary Neera Yadav guilty of a land scam in Noida and sentenced her to four years of rigorous imprisonment.

The main beneficiary of the scam, Ashok Chaturvedi of the Rs 1,700-crore Uflex Group, has also been similarly jailed for four years. Yadav had reduced land rates and eased the eligibility criterion to benefit Chaturvedi to the tune of Rs 1.12 crore.

How hard can it be for Steve Beshear to do a little research, here is a page on Chaturvedi on Wikipedia?

Politics 101 – The Ask

Money is the blood of political campaigns. If you don’t have money you can’t get your name recognized, your message out, or be able to respond to your opponent when they absurdly mangle the truth.

This is a reality, whether you run for dog catcher or president. Every campaign spends an absurd amount of time fund raising. As a campaign manager you want to chain you candidate to a desk with a phone and list of names and phone numbers. There should also be fund raising person with coffee, whatever munchies the candidate likes and a whip sitting beside them.

Some candidates thrive on this. They can spend hours dialing one number after another. Others act like my 13 year old cat Harley going to the vet, all teeth, claws and attitude. One candidate I know of refused to use the phone to ask for a contribution. He had to see someone in person before he could ask for a contribution.

So you resort to everything you can think of to raise money. You have the candidate call everyone they are related to or known professionally or went to school with, or have had any sort of vague contact with in the past century.

Then you move on to the cold calls, the people that never heard of you but might be willing for whatever reason to support you. T

hen you have other people hold fundraisers for you. The people show up, get a drink and a munchies, listen to the candidate do their stock speech and then everyone writes a check. Then there is the mailing of letters to targeted groups, you really hope this produces more money than it costs to buy postage.

Finally there is the internet. The donate button is on every campaign home page. We hear a lot about money bombs, if they don’t work they become money firecrackers, but the method is really old school with a new technology. Whether you do it snail mail or email or via Facebook the idea is the same. Hit up a lot of people for a small contribution.

This brings me to the lab portion of this Politics 101 post, here’s the experiment and I have no idea how this will turn out.

I’m going to share this post on Facebook, nothing new there, but here is the switch up: I’m going to ask all my Facebook Friends, all 651 of you, to try and make this go viral.

Here’s the way we create a virus.

Share my post with all your friends.

Ask them to share this with all of their friends, and then all of their friends, on and on. You catch the drift. Everyone that shares the post needs to make a donation.

The donations are the way we keep score.

MAKE THIS GO VIRAL - SHARE THIS WITH ALL YOUR FRIENDS ON FACEBOOK DONATE $20 TO GATEWOOD AT http://www.gatewood.com/ MAKE THE DONATION NOW AND KEEP SHARING THE MESSAGE

I’ll let you know what 651 people can do, let us see if we have a money bomb or a money firecracker.