gluck

=https://www.linkedin.com/in/robgluckbsRob has nearly two decades of experience developing and leading high-profile strategic positioning and thought leadership initiatives for Fortune 100 companies, major trade associations and national political campaigns. In 2006 he helped create the Discover America Partnership, a coalition of travel companies to increase international visitation to the U.S. The effort generated hundreds of articles and the passage of eight separate pieces of federal legislation. Travel Weekly called it the “industry’s biggest legislative victory in a decade.” Prior to helping found High Lantern Group he managed the external affairs strategy for the Walt Disney Company’s worldwide vacation and leisure division, including positioning on key industry issues and reputation among key stakeholders. Rob serves on the Board of Governors for the Los Angeles Economic Development Corporation. He also serves on the Board of Directors for Coro Southern California as well as for Goodwill of Southern California. He is a graduate of the Harvard Business School Program for Leadership Development, and received his Bachelors Degree in Political Science with Honors and Distinction from Kenyon College.
Julie PierceManaging Director at High Lantern GroupKendall BentzKendall BentzManaging Director at High Lantern GroupDrew (Andrew) HolzapfelDrew (Andrew) HolzapfelManaging Director at High Lantern GroupDaniel CasseDaniel CasseStrategy. Message. CEOs.Scott SilvieraScott SilvieraAssociate at High Lantern GroupMark Hoffmann, Ph.D.Mark Hoffmann, Ph.D.Director at High Lantern GroupDana SchroederDana SchroederAssociate at High Lantern GroupJeremy ButtonJeremy ButtonExecutive Communications. Thought Leadership. Issues Management. Reputation Management. Organizational AlignmentMichael HodinMichael HodinManaging Director at High Lantern GroupHelen PollockHelen PollockAssociate Director at High Lantern Group"The Making of Leopoldo López: A Closer Look at the Democratic Bona Fides of the Rock Star of Venezuela’s Opposition." That’s the headline to a new investigation into Venezuela’s most prominent opposition leader who has been jailed since February 2014. President Nicolás Maduro dismisses him as a criminal. But López’s supporters call him a political prisoner and accuse Maduro of silencing a dissenting voice. We speak with Roberto Lovato about his new piece in Foreign Policy. Lovato is a writer and visiting scholar at the UC Berkeley Center for Latino Policy Research.  <a href="http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/07/27/the-making-of-leopoldo-lopez-democratic-venezuela-opposition/" style="text-decoration: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none;">http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/07/27/the-making-of-leopoldo-lopez-democratic-venezuela-opposition/</a><a href="http://www.democracynow.org/2015/8/5/the_making_of_leopoldo_lopez_an" style="text-decoration: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none;">http://www.democracynow.org/2015/8/5/the_making_of_leopoldo_lopez_an</a>Carmona, dad signed, but denied....FP
<p style="margin: 0px auto 25px; box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family: Tiempos, Georgia, serif; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 2.05rem; font-size: 17px; vertical-align: baseline; width: 615.046875px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;">Leopoldo López was born in 1971 to one of Venezuela’s most elite families, a direct descendent of both 19th-century revolutionary leader Simón Bolivar and Venezuela’s first president, Cristóbal Mendoza. His mother, Antonieta Mendoza de López, is a top executive at the Cisneros Group, a global media conglomerate. His father, Leopoldo López Gil, is a restaurateur and businessman who sits on the editorial board of <em style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;">El Nacional.<p style="margin: 0px auto 25px; box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family: Tiempos, Georgia, serif; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 2.05rem; font-size: 17px; vertical-align: baseline; width: 615.046875px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“I belong to one percent of the privileged people,” López said as a teenager, long before the Occupy movement popularized the term, during an interview with a student newspaper at the Hun School of Princeton, an elite private boarding school in New Jersey. It was at Hun, whose alumni roster includes Saudi princes, the child of a U.S. president, and the child of a Fortune 500 CEO, that López said he experienced “an awakening of the responsibility I have towards the people of my country.”<p style="margin: 0px auto 25px; box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family: Tiempos, Georgia, serif; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 2.05rem; font-size: 17px; vertical-align: baseline; width: 615.046875px;">López went on from Hun to Kenyon College, a liberal arts college in Ohio, where he developed relationships that would serve him to this day. It was a former classmate and political consultant, Rob Gluck, who led the effort to set up Friends of a Free Venezuela, the media-centered advocacy group behind a high-profile U.S. campaign for López’s release. As a testament to the “powerful impact [López] has had on people,” Gluck, a spokesperson for the group, told me, “within days of the arrest, really within hours,” friends from Kenyon in influential positions in journalism, communications, advocacy, and government were “emailing, connecting, volunteering, [and] asking what could we do.”<p style="margin: 0px auto 25px; box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family: Tiempos, Georgia, serif; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 2.05rem; font-size: 17px; vertical-align: baseline; width: 615.046875px;">Some of these classmates went on to found the Free Leopoldo campaign, a well-connected advocacy group that has run a vibrant PR and social media campaign on López’s behalf. Among the Kenyon classmates helping to power Free Leopoldo in the United States is Republican Party operative Leonardo Alcivar, who ran communications strategies for the Romney campaign and the 2004 Republican National Convention and now works at a communications firm that advises companies on their online strategy. No other element of the Venezuelan opposition has anything resembling the U.S. media operation that López has through Free Leopoldo.<p style="margin: 0px auto 25px; box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family: Tiempos, Georgia, serif; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 2.05rem; font-size: 17px; vertical-align: baseline; width: 615.046875px;">Gluck is himself also a former Republican strategist who worked on Lamar Alexander’s presidential campaign and the successful campaign to recall California Governor Gray Davis, which resulted in the election of Arnold Schwarzenegger. He is currently a managing partner at High Lantern Group, a Pasadena-based communications strategy firm. He said López has “always been progressive,” and if measured on the U.S. political spectrum, he’d be “left of center.” Gluck runs Friends of a Free Venezuela pro bono — “personal time, passion, and connections” drive the work, he said — but his communications firm has also been retained by López’s family, he said, to “get the message out about [López’s] situation.”<p style="margin: 0px auto 25px; box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family: Tiempos, Georgia, serif; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 2.05rem; font-size: 17px; vertical-align: baseline; width: 615.046875px;">After Kenyon, López went to Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, where he met another influential figure who would become a key supporter — Venezuelan national Pedro Burelli, a former JP Morgan executive and pre-Chávez-era member of the board of directors of PDVSA, Venezuela’s national petroleum firm, which controls the world’s largest crude reserves. The two first met, Burelli said, during a recruiting trip at Harvard while Burelli was still at JP Morgan. “Someone called my attention to this young Venezuelan who was at the Kennedy School where I had graduated many years before,” said Burelli, who is now a corporate consultant with B+V Advisors, “and I connected him.” López went to work at PDVSA in 1996 and stayed there as an analyst for three years during Burelli’s tenure on PDVSA’s board. In 1998, López’s mother joined PDVSA as well, as vice president of corporate affairs.<p style="margin: 0px auto 25px; box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family: Tiempos, Georgia, serif; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 2.05rem; font-size: 17px; vertical-align: baseline; width: 615.046875px;">Burelli considers himself a “very good friend” of López, and said he has provided informal advice to the opposition leader through his many contentious political transitions, from López’s time at PDVSA to the most recent clashes with the Maduro government. Burelli explained that while he was at PDVSA, López helped found a group called Primero Justicia — which led, in 2000, to the formation of an opposition party of the same name. In 1998, a comptroller general investigation found that López’s mother had channeled $120,000 in corporate donations from PDVSA to Primero Justicia while she and López were at the firm, in violation of anti-corruption laws. López’s attorneys point out that Primero Justicia was a nonprofit at the time, not yet a party, and López never stood trial on the charges. But the comptroller general nevertheless barred López from holding office from 2008 until 2014.<p style="margin: 0px auto 25px; box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family: Tiempos, Georgia, serif; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 2.05rem; font-size: 17px; vertical-align: baseline; width: 615.046875px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">López left Primero Justicia in 2007 over disputes with other party members and then leapt from one political party to another, leading up to his quixotic run for president in 2012 on the ticket of his current party, Voluntad Popular. He was also, during these years, playing a pivotal role in Venezuela’s rising student opposition movement. A leaked State Department cable from 2007 reads, in part, “the young, dynamic opposition mayor of Chacao Municipality in Caracas, Leopoldo Lopez, addressed students during early demonstrations in his jurisdiction, and he is actively advising them behind-the-scenes”; another describes López as “the best channel to the student movement.” Some JAVU leaders, including one mentioned in the cables, went on to become active in Voluntad Popular, the party that fueled López’s rise to national prominence....==