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real-human



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PostPosted: Wed Apr 05, 2017 10:29 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

MalibuGuru wrote:
real-human wrote:
well he is no longer a permanent member on the national Security council. what idiot thought he belonged there...

his background he makes money from residuals from a comedy show he wrote for. how impressive is he... such deep experience. such intellectual accomplishments.


And your accomplishments are? You're life equates to no more than a pimple on Bannon’s ass.


too funny, I bet my math logic technology human factors skills and abilities would put him in the dog house.

And knowing that I know I am not qualified due to lack of direct experience for one to be on the NSC permanent committee. Kinda like Jarrad is not qualified to be dealing with Iraq issues, or his daughter with anything but buying cloth issues. It is the most incompetent Whitehouse imaginable.

But thanks for the compliment that you do believe I could be worthy of such a position that you would include it.

so tell us about his ass that you know so much about....

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real-human



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PostPosted: Wed Apr 05, 2017 10:34 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2017/4/5/1650521/-My-take-on-the-Bannon-NSC-ouster
Quote:

This should be a quick hit. Like all US citizens with 12 functioning brain cells, it was extremely gratifying to see the unceremonious ouster of “Breitbart” Bannon from the NSC. Speculation seems to be that this is either the start or a continuation of a power struggle in the west wing. I see it a little differently.

General H.R. McMaster was a much needed figure for Trump after the debacle of Mike Flynn. He was widely, almost universally respected, and had a solid reputation for speaking truth to power, even at the expense of it costing him a promotion. But McMaster was well familiar with Trump and his administrative dysfunction. He came with conditions. One of them was sole and total control of his NSC staff, a condition that Trump had balked at in negotiations with a couple of earlier candidates. This time he had no choice but to accept, he needed respectability in that position.

It seemed to work at first. The National Security members who had been ditched and put on “on call” status for meetings were restored. But then the trouble started. Bannon stayed. KT McFarland, a Trump crony stayed. Then the straw on the camels back. It was revealed that a young, NSC staffer, Ezra Cohen-Watnick of helping to leak the documents to Devin Nunes that turned into yet another debacle. McMaster wanted to send him back to where he came from. Bannon went to Trump, and Trump sided with Bannon. Cohen-Watkins stays, he served his purpose.

So, if Trump and Bannon are in such firm control, why all of the sudden, frenetic activity in the NSC? A couple of days ago, it was announced that KT McFarland was leaving the NSC to take the post of US Ambassador to Singapore. Singapore? Considering her current position in the administration, this “promotion” is only superior to a consular posting in Tierra del Fuego. Now Bannon is gone. The official reason is that Bannon was installed as a check on Mike Flynn. Bullshit, Flynn has been long gone, why did Bannon stick around until now?

My take? General McMaster dropped the hammer. He told Trump, “either Bannon goes, or I go, and good luck finding a replacement”. If Cohen-Watkins goes, to my mind that will be the cherry on the sundae.

And just think, it’s quite possible that Trump and Bannon could have avoided all this Sturm und Drang if they had just let McMaster cashier that young idiot when he asked. Freakin’ idiots!

Wednesday, Apr 5, 2017 · 3:09:34 PM M · Murfster35
And something that occurred to me a little earlier, but I didn’t include it in the original diary...While I don’t think it was the overriding reason for the ouster, I think it is quite possible that after the events of yesterday, the North Korea missile launch, but especially the atrocity in Syria, Trump might well have realized that this is no time for ideological political bullshit on the NSC, especially since Trump himself is to abysmally ignorant of the actual mechanics and dangers of national security...

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real-human



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PostPosted: Wed Apr 05, 2017 10:45 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/327534-bannon-threatened-to-quit-if-removed-from-national-security-council
Bannon threatened to quit if removed from National Security Council role: report

Quote:
Bannon threatened to quit if removed from National Security Council role: report

Chief White House strategist Stephen Bannon was unhappy with the decision to remove him from his role on the National Security Council and threatened to quit, according to a new report.

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PostPosted: Sat Apr 15, 2017 11:24 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/04/donald-trump-steve-bannon-breitbart-215026

Quote:
Trump mega-donor Rebekah Mercer, Bannon’s chief patron, spent much of Friday at the offices of Cambridge Analytica — a data firm in which her family is invested and on whose board Bannon sat before joining the White House — exploring potential gigs for Bannon should he be fired, according to The New York Times.


remember this guy is loved by the alt right...
he is the founder of Pizza-gate
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2017/04/14/alt-right-ringleader-mike-cernovich-threatens-to-drop-motherlode-if-steve-bannon-is-ousted.html


Alt-Right Ringleader Mike Cernovich Threatens to Drop ‘Motherlode’ If Steve Bannon Is Ousted
The Pizzagate conspiracy theorist claims to have a cache of dirty secrets that he’s willing to deploy.

Ben Collins
BEN COLLINS
Quote:

04.14.17 3:20 PM ET
A week after President Donald Trump began to publicly distance himself from White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon, alt-right ringleader Mike Cernovich threatened to release a “motherlode” of stories that could “destroy marriages” if Bannon is formally let go from the administration.
Cernovich made the claims that he’d release a series of “scoops” if Bannon is officially pushed out of the White House on an eleven-minute, self-recorded Periscope Thursday night.
“If they get rid of Bannon, you know what’s gonna happen? The motherlode. If Bannon is removed, there are gonna be divorces, because I know about the mistresses, the sugar babies, the drugs, the pill popping, the orgies. I know everything,” said Cernovich.
“If they go after Bannon, the mother of all stories is gonna drop, and we’re just gonna destroy marriages, relationships—it’s gonna get personal.”
The Daily Beast reached out to Cernovich, asking who he meant by “they” and if he had documentation for the claims. He was on InfoWars’ radio show and livestream most of Friday afternoon, and did not respond at press time.
Alt-right leaders have spent the week pushing a #KeepBannon hashtag on Twitter, less than a week after a #FireKushner hashtag prominently amplified by Cernovich became the No. 1 trend in the United States on Twitter.

The hashtags refer to the falling out between Bannon and Jared Kushner that played out through planted quotes in websites like Breitbart, where Bannon previously worked as its CEO, after Trump’s son-in-law began to take over more responsibilities inside the Trump White House.
The proxy quote war led Trump to tell the New York Post on Tuesday that, “Steve is a good guy, but I told them to straighten it out or I will.”
The president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., tweeted just last week that Cernovich deserved a Pulitzer for his recent coverage of Susan Rice’s efforts to better identify Trump campaign officials in intelligence reports.
“Congrats to @Cernovich for breaking the #SusanRice story,” Trump Jr. tweeted. “In a long gone time of unbiased journalism he’d win the Pulitzer, but not today!”
Cernovich cited the Rice story and another piece about Trump National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster, which were both scoops later picked up by Bloomberg’s Eli Lake, as proof of his sourcing inside the White House.
“I have more stories that I haven’t released. I haven’t released every scoop that I have. I release my scoops strategically. I’m sitting on way more stories,” he said on his Periscope.
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Cernovich and many other alt-right leaders famously split from the Trump administration’s party line last week when Trump signed off on a 59-missile strike on a Syrian airbase. Alt-right and conspiracy websites like InfoWars echoed both Russian public officials and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s claim that the attack was a “false flag.” On Thursday, Assad floated to state media that the attack was entirely staged.
“I will go TMZ on the globalists. I will go Gossip Girl on the globalists. I will go Gawker on the globalists. So you mother-effers going after Bannon, just know I broke two of the biggest stories before anybody else,” Cernovich said on his Periscope. “If you think I don’t know the pills people are popping, the mistresses, the sugar babies—I know all of it. So you better be smart. Because the mother of all stories will be dropped because I don’t care.”
Cernovich has a long history of floating conspiracy theories about alt-right opponents and people he deems to be “globalists”. He was one of the leading peddlers of the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, which claimed Hillary Clinton and John Podesta were central figures in a fictitious child sex ring run out of the basement of a pizza shop. He also repeatedly claimed throughout the campaign that Clinton was dying of a litany of diseases, from syphilis to Parkinson’s.
Fox News ran an article on Friday commending Cernovich's recent stories, however, saying his "two recent scoops have been anything but fake."
“Hire public relations firms. Pay off (Trump supporting radio host) Bill Mitchell to call me names. Fabricate things about me. I don’t care,” said Cernovich. “You can’t kill what is already dead. What is dead cannot die.”

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real-human



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PostPosted: Tue May 02, 2017 11:55 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

who is jared?

Jared Kushner left some things off his disclosure form—like a company with $1 billion in loans

http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2017/5/2/1658137/-Jared-Kushner-left-some-things-off-his-disclosure-form-like-a-company-with-1-billion-in-loans
Quote:

Just because Jared Kushner doesn’t talk doesn’t mean he’s marshaling great thoughts. He may simply have nothing to say. And the more time passes, the more Donald Trump’s son-in-law seems to be nothing but what he appears to be: a rich kid whose biggest achievement was being born into the right family.

However, there are times when Kushner really is failing to speak up about something he knows. Like how he just forgot to mention his involvement with a real estate startup with ties to, who else, Goldman Sachs and real-life vampire Peter Thiel.

Kushner turns out to be co-founder of Cadre, a start-up company that is meant to attract investors for high-budget real estate projects. The other two founders are Jared’s brother and a 29-year-old friend. Being one of three founding partners in a firm might not amount to much if Cadre was nothing more than a hobby business or an idea that went nowhere. However, in this case …

To get off the ground, Cadre turned to a Goldman Sachs fund and a number of high-profile investors. Among them were the venture-capital firms of Mr. Thiel, Silicon Valley's most prominent supporter of Mr. Trump, and Vinod Khosla, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems Inc., according to Cadre's website. Other backers include Chinese entrepreneur David Yu, co-founder with Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.'s Jack Ma of a Shanghai-based private-equity firm, hedge-fund manager Daniel Och and real-estate magnate Barry Sternlicht, people close to Cadre said.
And just how much money is Jared on the line for in this little afterthought of a business?

The Cadre stake is one of many interests -- and ties to large financial institutions -- that Mr. Kushner didn't identify on his disclosure form, according to a Wall Street Journal review of securities and other filings. Others include loans totaling at least $1 billion, from more than 20 lenders, to properties and companies part-owned by Mr. Kushner, the Journal found. He has also provided personal guarantees on more than $300 million of the debt, according to the analysis.
There’s forgetful and then there’s deceitful. A billion dollars is definitely on one side of that line.

Perhaps Kushner was hiding his $1 billion involvement and $300 million personal debt because he didn’t want Steve Bannon to find out where he got some of his money.

Cadre also secured a $250 million line of credit from the family office of George Soros, a top Democratic donor whom Mr. Trump criticized during his presidential campaign, the people close to the company said. Mr. Soros's family office is also an investor in Cadre.
$250 million from George Soros? Does this mean that Jared Kushner is one of those professional paid protesters?

Not exactly. It just means that Kushner is on the hook to a lot of people—a lot of people—in a lot of different countries. And hiding those connections means that Trump’s son-in-law failed to reveal a big part of his conflicts of interest when supposedly detailing his affairs.

It’s another example of how “disclosure forms” that have almost no checking and no enforcement mechanism are no substitute for tax returns and other documents that show were these people are really hiding their money. And their debts.

How much has Kushner distanced himself from this multi-billion dollar entity that can swing real estate deals around the world?

While Mr. Williams acts as the public face of Cadre, Mr. Kushner remains one of the owners, with the power to "influence the [firm's] management or policies," according to the latest public information on file with the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority. Jared Kushner's company JCK Cadre LLC is shown as owing 25% to 50% of Quadro Partners Inc., which owns at least 75% of RealCadre LLC, which does business as Cadre. Mr. Kushner has reduced his ownership stake to less than 25%, his lawyer Ms. Gorelick said.
Ah. So Jared Kushner is only hiding a controlling interest in a secretive real estate start-up that shuffles money around between billionaires, investment banks, and foreign interests. That shouldn’t get in the way of his establishing peace in the Middle East, or solving the opioid epidemic, or ...

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PostPosted: Fri Aug 04, 2017 10:22 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/steve-bannon-once-guided-a-global-firm-that-made-millions-helping-gamers-cheat/2017/08/04/ef7ae442-76c8-11e7-803f-a6c989606ac7_story.html?utm_term=.ec276517b062&wpisrc=nl_evening&wpmm=1

Stephen Bannon once guided a global firm that made millions helping gamers cheat

Quote:

The Washington Post
Democracy Dies in Darkness


en Bannon once guided a global firm that made millions helping gamers cheat
By Shawn Boburg and Emily Rauhala August 4 at 11:15 AM

White House chief strategist Steve Bannon talks with others in the Rose Garden. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
Stephen K. Bannon had already been successful in Hollywood and on Wall Street when he flew to Hong Kong in mid-2005 to learn more about a promising new opportunity.

A start-up called Internet Gaming Entertainment, or IGE, had found a novel way to make millions of dollars each month in the exploding online video game industry. Working from the 19th floor of a skyscraper in Hong Kong, the company sold virtual goods for real money — magical swords and capes and other accoutrements that granted video game players power and access in more than a dozen popular online role-playing games.

There was one problem, though: The companies that owned and operated these fantasy games prohibited what IGE was doing, and even considered it illegal. Several IGE executives told The Washington Post that they thought Bannon could help change that. Bannon agreed to become the company’s vice chairman.

“The whole reason Bannon came on was to try to legitimize the business,” said David Christensen, who was hired as the company’s vice president of business development about the same time as Bannon.

In the end, it didn’t work.

The story of Bannon’s six years with IGE and its successor companies has remained largely unexplored, even as Bannon has become one of the most influential political figures in the White House. His affiliation with the company cuts against his current image as a crusading champion of blue-collar manufacturing jobs and as a fierce opponent of globalism. It also shows Bannon’s willingness to be part of a company that operated in what one legal expert called “a classic gray market.”
Bannon helped persuade private equity firms, including his former employer Goldman Sachs, to invest tens of millions of dollars in the venture, which relied partly on labor from low-wage video game players in China to earn the credits that IGE then sold to gamers around the world. In 2007, however, IGE faced pressure from gaming companies, a class action lawsuit, an investigation by authorities in Florida and financial stress. Bannon soon steered IGE away from its virtual goods business.

Interviews with a half a dozen former employees and executives of IGE, and hundreds of internal company documents, reveal for the first time how the company worked to avoid detection by gaming operators — for example, using the identities of unwitting U.S. residents to create gaming accounts and connecting to proxy servers so its activities would be harder to trace to its Hong Kong office.

It is not clear how much Bannon knew about these tactics, which were in place before he started and continued afterward. He did not respond to requests for comment or an email with detailed questions.


Here's what you need to know about the man who went from Breitbart News chairman to Donald Trump's campaign CEO before his appointment as chief White House strategist and senior counselor. (Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post)
A former child actor’s big idea
IGE was the brainchild of Brock Pierce, a former child actor in Hollywood who had roles in the 1990s family films “The Mighty Ducks” and “First Kid.”

Precocious and quick-witted as a teenager, Pierce was also an avid gamer who had an entrepreneurial streak. In 2003, at 22, he and a partner opened an office in an industrial district of Hong Kong. The small office was a round-the-clock operation, its 15 employees taking orders from gamers around the world, former employees said.

Pierce, reached by phone, asked a reporter to email questions to him but did not respond to subsequent emails or multiple messages on his cellphone.

For wealthy gamers, IGE offered an alluring proposition. Instead of toiling for days, weeks or months to advance beyond the early stages of an online role-playing game, they could simply buy the virtual goods that granted advanced powers or unlocked new virtual realms.


“It wasn’t unheard of for gamers to come to our website and spend $10,000” on a fully-outfitted character in a video game, said Greg Jelniker, who joined the company in 2005 as its vice president of operations but said he was later pushed out by Bannon.

In April 2004, according to internal company records, IGE took in more than $2.7 million in revenue for virtual goods in four popular online games, including “EverQuest” and “Lineage II.” A year later, revenue for that same month rose to $6.7 million, those records show.


Customer service agents in IGE’s Hong Kong office, pictured here in January 2006, took orders for virtual goods for online games such as World of Warcraft. (Obtained by The Washington Post)
Flush with cash, IGE snapped up competitors in the emerging industry. It moved to a sleek glass skyscraper called Oxford House that also housed CNN’s Hong Kong office. It began recruiting seasoned executives from gaming and other industries, who were dazzled by what they saw in the cash-for-credits business.

Most of the companies that owned the online games prohibited trading virtual goods for real money — IGE’s core business — and they worked to stop the practice, closing down accounts by the hundreds. These companies charged gamers a monthly subscription to access and play the online role-playing games.


James Grimmelmann, a professor at Cornell who specializes in Internet law, said IGE was operating in “a classic gray market,” meaning that selling virtual goods for real cash — though not necessarily illegal — was not intended or authorized by the gaming companies.

Four former employees interviewed by The Post all acknowledged as much and reiterated a common sentiment that prevailed at the time.

“The idea was, let’s take it out of the gray market and make it legitimate,” Jelniker said.

IGE executives thought they could do this by persuading the game companies to support the practice. They reasoned that if they showed the gaming companies how much money players were willing to pay and agreed to share it with them, the companies would drop their objections and partner with start-ups like IGE.

Bannon became a key part of that effort in 2005.

At the time, Bannon was a Hollywood financier and former Goldman Sachs banker who had branched into documentary filmmaking.

“Bannon's role was fundraising and eventually trying to take the company public,” Christensen said.

Bannon lived in Laguna Beach, Calif., at the time and was also serving on the board of another company. But he took time to learn about IGE’s business, Christensen said.

“He familiarized himself with the business pretty deeply because he was talking to outside finance groups,” said Christensen, who was based in IGE’s Los Angeles office.

A former executive who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private details of the arrangement said Bannon was given a small ownership stake in the company in exchange for his advisory role.

Bannon began working closely with Pierce and visiting Hong Kong to learn more about IGE’s operations, according to former employees.

Michael Angeles, an operations manager in Hong Kong at the time, said Bannon was introduced to him in mid-2005 as “a big investor who would come in and start to help with the company.” At the time, Bannon was touring the Hong Kong office, sitting in on management meetings and introducing himself to the senior management, Angeles said.

Bannon visited the Hong Kong operation every few months, former employees said, sometimes bringing businessmen that employees imagined might be the big investor IGE needed.

“We sort of felt something big was going to happen,” Angeles said.

Low-paying ‘gold farms’
The month Bannon joined, IGE opened an office in Shanghai. The new office became an important hub in the network that supplied the virtual currency that IGE sold, often referred to as “gold.” That supply chain was also part of what made IGE so controversial.

“Gold farms” were popping up across China at the time. Low-wage Chinese workers accumulated gaming credits by playing around the clock and selling the credits to brokers. The “gold farms” paid young workers as little as 25 cents per hour, according to a 2005 New York Times story that examined conditions inside what it said had become known as “virtual sweatshops.”


While these “gold farmers” were not under the direct employ of IGE, it was an open secret inside the company that IGE bought credits from them, former employees said.

“The reality is, most of the gold was being farmed in China by a bunch of guys in tiny little cubicles who played these games for a couple of bucks a day,” said Jelniker, the former IGE executive, an account that was echoed by another former executive with direct knowledge of the arrangement. “Our operation in Shanghai would consolidate all these farming accounts and transfer [the gold] to the operation in Hong Kong.”

IGE’s growth, its entire business model, rested on a simple truth.

“Players in the West didn’t have time, but they had money,” said Lars Lien, who joined IGE in 2004 as head of customer support and worked there for about a year. “The reverse was true in China. People didn’t have money, but they had plenty of time.”

Employees in Hong Kong handled the retail side of the business, a combination of customer service in both the real and virtual worlds.

Most of the online games allowed players to trade or give other characters virtual loot. IGE employees controlled hundreds of accounts in these games and would have their avatars meet customers’ avatars inside the games to transfer the virtual goods after receiving a real-world credit card payment.
Gaming companies regularly banned accounts that were suspected of being linked to real-money transactions.

Former employees described a cat-and-mouse game.

IGE employees were instructed to conceal their activities both inside and outside the games, according to two former employees and company documents. They did this by taking steps that would shield their locations in Hong Kong and China, as well as their identities, from gaming companies.

“There was a lot of effort to conceal our operations both in China and Hong Kong,” Jelniker said.

An undated employee-training presentation obtained by The Post instructed IGE workers never to type certain words in public forums inside the games. The list included “IGE” and “Names of any of our affiliated sites.”


Additionally, IGE employees in the Hong Kong office created accounts for the company’s delivery avatars using the names and home addresses of unwitting U.S. residents picked at random in a phone directory, Angeles said. The company used dial-up phone service that connected to servers in the United States, making it appear that they were using computers there rather than in Hong Kong, according to Angeles and Jelniker.

“We were spending $20,000 a month on dial-up service,” Jelniker said.

Neither Jelniker nor Angeles recall whether Bannon was ever briefed on these measures.

Internal company documents show why IGE was being so careful. Gaming companies were banning their accounts by the hundreds. IGE kept a tally. In a four-week period between January and February 2006, for example, gaming companies closed down more than 800 accounts controlled by IGE, internal documents show.


Even so, business was skyrocketing. By October 2005, IGE’s monthly revenue had risen to $8.5 million, more than $5 million of that coming from purchases related to the hugely popular game “World of Warcraft,” corporate financial records show.

‘The adult in the room’
In February 2006, IGE and Bannon celebrated a major coup.

A group of private equity firms, led by Goldman Sachs, agreed to invest $60 million, according to former IGE employees.

Some of the investors had doubts given the prohibition from gaming companies but decided to jump in after seeing the explosive revenue growth, according to a person familiar with the investment who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

“There were issues and concerns about how owners of the games would react,” the person said. “But there was also a consumer reality where hundreds of thousands of gamers were doing this. . . . We thought it was going to be very lucrative.”

Goldman’s $30 million came through its Principal Strategies group, a now-defunct division that traded using the firm’s own money, according to the former IGE executive. Oak Investment Partners contributed $20 million and Maverick Capital another $10 million, according to this person. Goldman, Oak and Maverick declined to comment.

The person familiar with the investment said that Bannon gave the Wall Street investors confidence, especially given the relative youth of Pierce, the company’s chief executive.

“Bannon was the adult in the room,” the person said. “You’re dealing with the gaming community, you’re dealing with kids. He did inspire confidence.”

But the company was finding little success in its most important task: persuading game operators to accept real-money transactions inside their games. The biggest of their targets was Blizzard Entertainment, maker of the game “World of Warcraft,” which had become the largest moneymaker for IGE. Christensen met with executives at Blizzard, but they demurred.

“They felt this isn’t the right thing for us to be doing,” Christensen said.


IGE representatives woo gamers at a Shanghai electronics game conference in 2005. IGE relied on low-wage Chinese workers to earn credits in video games, then sold them to wealthy gamers around the world. (Obtained by The Washington Post)
These virtual worlds had their own calibrated economies, designed around the vagaries of supply and demand for virtual goods within the game. Gold farmers upset this balance, much as a real-world government might by printing excessive amounts of money.
“All of a sudden you have way too much gold coming into the virtual economy,” said Lien, the former IGE employee. “You see massive inflation. It’s like any other economy. For that reason, the game developers really hated this.”
In May 2006, Blizzard got more aggressive against what it called “cheating.” The company issued a news release saying that it had banned over 30,000 accounts.

A Blizzard representative did not return multiple emails or phone messages.

IGE and its suppliers suffered a “huge loss” after the crackdown, according to a notice that was posted on IGE’s website in China and captured by the Web archive Wayback Machine. Many of the shuttered accounts had accumulated virtual stockpiles that vanished when the accounts were closed. The IGE notice added that “we will no longer use the term ‘farmer’ to address our suppliers in any document or occasion, and we will not acknowledge or respond to the term. We will replace it with the term ‘professional gamer.’ ”

By January 2007, IGE’s virtual-currency business was in free fall, losing more than $500,000 a month, according to a lawsuit filed later by co-founder Alan Debonneville in a dispute over compensation.
IGE was struggling to pay its suppliers, prompting unpaid gold farmers to protest outside the Shanghai office in late April, according to Chinese news reports. A man who said he was owed money walked into the office brandishing what appeared to be a gun but turned out to be fake, according to Liu Yang, a former IGE employee who wrote about the incident on Zhihu.com, the Chinese equivalent of the social-networking site Quora. Yang declined an interview request.

The turmoil convinced IGE to abandon its core business.

It sold its virtual-currency trading arm to a competitor called Atlas Technology Group in April 2007, according to court documents. The following month, a gamer in Florida lodged a class action lawsuit against IGE alleging that IGE had violated subscriber agreements for “World of Warcraft.” The suit alleged that IGE had “received tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions, of dollars by selling World of Warcraft virtual property or currency . . . generated by cheap labor in third world countries.”

The lawsuit was later settled, with IGE promising not to sell virtual currency in “World of Warcraft” for five years.

In June 2007, Pierce stepped down as chief executive, and Bannon took his place.
“Steve brings a wealth of experience that will serve the company well moving forward,” Pierce wrote in a news release.

In August of that year, Blizzard Entertainment asked the Florida attorney general to investigate “companies attempting to profit illegally from” the video game, according to documents released to The Post in response to a public records request.

About four months later, the attorney general issued a subpoena to IGE as part of an investigation into whether the company was violating the state’s Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act, records show. “IGE is effectively stealing part of the game assets from their rightful owner, Blizzard, and turning this theft into a profit,” a Florida prosecutor wrote in a court filing justifying the subpoena.


Authorities ultimately dropped the investigation after IGE turned over documents showing that it had gotten out of the cash-for-credits business. The case was closed in September 2008.

IGE was the subject of an extensive story that year by Julian Dibbell in Wired magazine headlined, “The Decline and Fall of an Ultra Rich Online Gaming Empire.” Bannon’s tenure managing the embattled firm had just begun.
A new focus
Bannon steered the company, which had changed its name to Affinity Media Holdings, away from its controversial core business, focusing instead on Internet chatrooms and forums for gamers, some of which IGE had acquired before it got out of the virtual-currency business.

Bannon became fascinated with the collective power of the gamers who gathered on these sites, according to journalist Joshua Green, who wrote a book, “Devil’s Bargain ,” about Bannon’s rise in the Trump administration. Selling virtual currency was highly unpopular among many gamers, and they railed against IGE in these chatrooms, putting pressure on the companies that operated the games not to partner with IGE.
“These guys, these rootless white males, had monster power,” Bannon told Green.

Bannon said he hoped to harness that power with Breitbart News, the website he ran starting in 2012 until he joined the Trump campaign last year.

Affinity Media Holdings stabilized under Bannon’s leadership. Bannon remained chief executive of Affinity and an affiliated company called IMI Exchange until 2011. IMI Exchange, based in Seoul, ran an auction website that allowed gamers to trade virtual goods directly. Unlike with IGE, no real currency was exchanged, and no third party took a cut from the gamers.

The person familiar with the investment from Goldman Sachs and two other Wall Street firms said IMI became the company's “principal asset.” IMI was sold last summer to a public company for $42 million, according to public documents in South Korea, about 30 percent less than the initial amount the private equity firms had invested in IGE.
It seems to have worked out better for Bannon.
Public documents in South Korea show that Affinity Media owned about 6 percent of IMI Exchange when it was sold last year. Bannon’s financial disclosure form for his White House job as Trump’s chief strategist shows that he made between $100,000 and $1 million last year from Affinity Media, income that was described as “capital gains.”

Staff writer Michael Kranish contributed to this report from Washington and researcher Luna Lin reported from Beijing.



testtesttest

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real-human



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PostPosted: Fri Aug 18, 2017 12:13 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

AP sources: Strategist Steve Bannon leaving White House

https://www.abqjournal.com/1049993/ap-sources-strategist-steve-bannon-leaving-white-house.html?utm_source=notification&utm_medium=notification&utm_campaign=1049993

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nw30



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PostPosted: Fri Aug 18, 2017 12:38 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Now that Bannon is out things will get interesting with him. He's been vilified from day one my the media, claiming things like he was the one who set the racist agenda of the W.H., now that he's gone just watch the media clamor after him for interviews to get the inside view of Trump. From villain to hero, not that much different from John McCain who has experienced both being a villain and a hero in the eyes of the main stream media.

Who's going to be the lucky journalist to get the first interview with him, will it be Oprah, or Meagan Kelly, the race is now starting I'm sure. Trying to keep up with who the media loves or hates can give you whiplash. Just watch.
And wait until O.J. Simpson gets out, the same thing will happen.

Our main stream media is a hypocritical joke.
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real-human



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PostPosted: Fri Aug 18, 2017 1:06 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

nw30 wrote:
Now that Bannon is out things will get interesting with him. He's been vilified from day one my the media, claiming things like he was the one who set the racist agenda of the W.H., now that he's gone just watch the media clamor after him for interviews to get the inside view of Trump. From villain to hero, not that much different from John McCain who has experienced both being a villain and a hero in the eyes of the main stream media.

Who's going to be the lucky journalist to get the first interview with him, will it be Oprah, or Meagan Kelly, the race is now starting I'm sure. Trying to keep up with who the media loves or hates can give you whiplash. Just watch.
And wait until O.J. Simpson gets out, the same thing will happen.

Our main stream media is a hypocritical joke.


Idiot he is the media... oh he is such a white victim of the media...

he ran brietbart, what are their ratings with the right wing?

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nw30



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PostPosted: Fri Aug 18, 2017 1:28 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

real-human wrote:
nw30 wrote:
Now that Bannon is out things will get interesting with him. He's been vilified from day one my the media, claiming things like he was the one who set the racist agenda of the W.H., now that he's gone just watch the media clamor after him for interviews to get the inside view of Trump. From villain to hero, not that much different from John McCain who has experienced both being a villain and a hero in the eyes of the main stream media.

Who's going to be the lucky journalist to get the first interview with him, will it be Oprah, or Meagan Kelly, the race is now starting I'm sure. Trying to keep up with who the media loves or hates can give you whiplash. Just watch.
And wait until O.J. Simpson gets out, the same thing will happen.

Our main stream media is a hypocritical joke.


Idiot he is the media... oh he is such a white victim of the media...

he ran brietbart, what are their ratings with the right wing?

You have got to be the only person in the western hemisphere who thinks the main stream media is run by conservatives. But that's okay, whichever delusion keeps you feeling the way you do is just fine. Like I've said before, you're a great ambassador for the left, but not real humans in general, you fail at that one.
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