Telecommunications companies that profit on the Obamaphone Lifeline giveaway have hired a retired four-star Army general to attack a Louisiana senator concerned about waste in the program.
BKM Strategies, the political advertising agency of Mary Cheney, daughter of the former vice president, has agreed to promote the welfare program on behalf of the vendors who provide the subsidized phone service.
BKM is tasked with generating support for Obamaphones among Republicans, and its plan calls for conflating the program with military service, which in reality has no bearing on eligibility.
Cheney’s firm appears to have hired Gen. Wesley Clark, through a consultancy called Wesley K. Clark & Associates LLC, a “relationships-oriented firm that makes it happen.” Neither Clark nor the firm responded to Washington Examiner questions about their relationship, but the general has told Louisiana reporters that his advocacy is being paid for by an unnamed public relations firm.
Since 2013, Clark has repeatedly traveled to cities in Louisiana, the home state of Republican Sen. David Vitter, claiming that because he doesn’t support the free cell phone initiative, he doesn’t support the military — a message seemingly designed to harm Vitter’s prospects in Louisiana’s upcoming gubernatorial election and to scare him into withdrawing his Senate bill to overhaul the Obamaphone program.
The program has been plagued with high levels of fraud, according to the Federal Communications Commission, which administers it. The Lifeline program is funded by a fee on all telephone customers’ monthly bills.
Vitter has introduced a bill to steer Lifeline away from cell phones and back to landlines, which would maintain the program’s goal of helping people seeking job interviews.
“It is unacceptable for a government program to have such a high rate of fraud,” Vitter said. “The alarming number of fraud and abuse cases within Lifeline makes it clear that this program is past the point of no return.”
Vitter has challenged Clark to debate the efficacy of the program, but Clark has thus far declined to do so.
Vitter also challenged Clark to reveal who is paying for his Obamaphone advocacy, saying in a recent letter “you signed your recent letter ‘Veterans Advocate.’ I question that self-bestowed title when you won’t disclose who’s paying for that advocacy or set dates for a public debate.”
The Examiner revealed last October that the group behind a mysterious ad blitz that bizarrely tied the welfare program to military service was the Cheney firm, working through a group called Prepaid Wireless Users of America.
Barry Bennett, a principal in the Cheney firm who previously worked for a group allied with former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, described himself as a staunch conservative, then praised the federal welfare and food stamp programs and claimed conservatives who question them “hate poor people.”
He said the firm’s goal was to change the “face of Lifeline” from that of a woman who said on YouTube that she was voting for President Obama because “he gave us a phone,” referring to “everybody in Cleveland low minority,” to military service members.
The program is generally not available to people employed by either the military or civilian employers since being eligible to receive free phone service requires having almost no income or being a food stamp recipient.
But eligibility has often not been verified, and in some states like Maryland, where the list of enrollees swelled 100-fold in the first few years of the Obama presidency, the number of Obamaphones is greater than the number of people below the poverty line.
The largest beneficiary of the program is TracFone, which successfully lobbied the FCC to expand the program and which continues to market the government program heavily. It is owned by Carlos Slim, one of the world’s richest men. TracFone’s CEO, F.J. Pollak, was a top Obama fundraiser.
Last month, the senator wrote to Pollak asking if TracFone is behind the Prepaid Wireless Users of America front group. It was the third time he had asked without receiving a response, according to Vitter’s letter.
He also asked how much it costs to provide the phone line, something the companies have refused to answer. They receive $9.25 per month from the federal government for every person they sign up for the program. But TracFone sells similar service to the general public for $7.
