LittleSis researchers are currently digging into the histories of current government and industry figures in the fracking debate, searching for overlaps, “revolving door” employment patterns, and conflicts of interest. Expect frequent updates from us about people and organizations of interest, and please consider lending a hand by joining the Fracker Watch research group, where you can also find some of the lists we’ve been working on, such as the New York State Fracking Lobbyists list.

Chesapeake lobbyist Stephanie Timmermeyer.

Today’s post concerns a top lobbyist for the embattled industry giant Chesapeake Energy, Stephanie Timmermeyer, who is the company’s director of regulatory affairs in the Appalachian Basin xand one of nine Chesapeake lobbyists registered in New York State. Chesapeake has spent big to influence policy in New York – according to NYPIRG data referenced in Common Cause’s 2011 report Deep Drilling, Deep Pockets, Chesapeake was the 18th-largest lobbying interest in the state in 2010, with over $1 million in expenditures.

Timmermeyer’s career blurs the line between public service and corporate subservience; she has moved through the revolving door into government and back out again, working as a corporate attorney, then as secretary of West Virginia’s Department of Environmental Protection, and now as a Chesapeake lobbyist, but never forgetting who she really worked for (hint: not the public). As a regulator, she went soft on industry; as a corporate lobbyist, she leverages her regulatory experience to ease the way for Chesapeake. She is hardly the company’s sole investment in regulatory capture, but her career is a case study in the revolving door and all the skewed incentives that come with it.

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In the latest sign that massive natural gas fracker Chesapeake Energy is in deep trouble, the company has retained George Sard, the CEO of Sard Verbinnen. Sard was described as a “spinmeister of the apocalypse” by Portfolio magazine in April 2009, because he has worked as a PR consultant for so many high-profile clients in moments of utter, humiliating public collapse.

Chesapeake is in distinguished company. Sard’s clients have included the Madoff brothers (Ponzi scheme), Eliot Spitzer (prostitution), Martha Stewart (insider trading), former Lehman Brothers CEO Dick Fuld (Ponzi scheme), and AIG (Ponzi scheme). His firm was also on the scene during the Enron collapse – JPMorgan hired him to beat back accusations that the bank was complicit in the Enron fraud (it eventually paid $135 million to settle SEC charges).

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The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a “free-market association of state lawmakers” that also resembles a conservative lobbying group, is facing intense scrutiny for its role in helping corporations influence and even draft legislation that has been enacted by many states, with little transparency or accountability to constituents. As of April 23, the legitimacy of ALEC’s public-charity status is being questioned in major media outlets, prompted by a submission of internal documents to the IRS by the watchdog organization Common Cause.

Laws produced or inspired by ALEC have privatized prisons, freed telecommunications companies from regulatory oversight, slashed some public school funds while diverting others to for-profit charter schools, and prevented public-sector employees from taking part in collective bargaining.

We used LittleSis.org’s “network search” function to generate a roster of 16 individuals who have leadership positions at more than one of the organizations that were funding sponsors of ALEC’s 2011 annual meeting. Network search is a sort of flexible interlocks search that allows advanced users to explore LittleSis data in new ways.

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Last year on Tax Day we shared some figures from the recently published Big Bank Tax Drain report on the LittleSis blog, showing that six of the largest financial institutions in the U.S. – Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, and Wells Fargo – collectively avoided $13 billion in tax payments in 2009 and 2010, “shortly after US taxpayers bailed them out to the tune of hundreds of billions. That’s enough to pay for all the teacher jobs lost in the course of the crisis – twice.”

This April, the researchers at Citizens for Tax Justice (CTJ) have issued an update to their major report on tax avoidance by 280 of the country’s largest corporations, published last November (“Corporate Taxpayers & Corporate Tax Dodgers, 2008-2010″). We’re disappointed but hardly surprised to learn from CTJ that of the 30 Fortune 500 companies who paid a less-than-zero federal income tax rate from 2008 to 2010 (a group that includes behemoths such as Boeing, GE, Verizon, and the aforementioned Wells Fargo), all but four maintained their net-refund tax status through 2011.

Taken by itself, this finding alone is enough to outrage those of us who do pay taxes, but as CTJ’s authors note, it also has serious implications for the state of our economy as a whole: “The Treasury Department reports that corporate taxes fell to only 1.2 percent of our gross domestic product over the past three fiscal years. That’s lower than at any time since the 1940s except for one single year during President Reagan’s first term. By comparison, corporate taxes averaged almost 4 percent of our GDP during the 1960s.”

Meanwhile, in a recent New York Daily News column, Joanna Molloy talks to some of the individual American workers who collectively pitch in to cover the yawning gap in public revenues created by large corporations’ tax-dodging. Patrick Welsh, a retiree, pays a 24% income tax rate while his former employer Verizon (tax rate 2008-2011: -3.8%) “hasn’t given a cost of living increase to retirees in 20 years and is now asking them to pay thousands in health insurance premiums.” Stories like these are especially galling given what we know about Verizon’s business practices – not only their negative federal income tax rate, but also their spiraling executive compensation ($70 million to their top six officers in 2011, up over 50% from the previous year) and plundering of retirement benefits (this 2006 “restructuring” press release preceded the elimination of defined pensions for 50,000 management-level Verizon employees, worth up to $5 billion; see Ellen E. Schultz’s Retirement Heist (2011) for the gory details).

Verizon’s record as a poor corporate citizen is fresh in our minds after we worked with 99% New York to produce this info sheet on the company, which was brandished at actions across New York State in February. With the disparity between the tax burden on most Americans and those few able to take advantage of tax loopholes likely to remain a prominent political issue in 2012, we hope that the work of organizations like CTJ reaches a wider audience and hastens the introduction of more equitable tax laws.

Larry Summers, former Obama economic adviser and a leading candidate for World Bank president, neatly sums up the problem of regulatory capture in Washington, reflecting on his time at the Clinton Treasury:

It was the practice of the Treasury to take advice from investment banks on bond market issues from others with a stake in development of those markets. It was common for the Treasury to listen to advice on currency intervention from those with undisclosed positions in currency markets. It was commonplace in our cooperation with financial markets, for example, to speak with members of the board of the New York Stock Exchange about market integrity, all of whom had a variety of positional interests with respect to different aspects of the market functioning.

So without judging what would or would not be a conflict of interest, what would or would not constitute a conflict of interest, it certainly would be my view and I think would have been the view of other US financial officials that there was no per-se disqualifying of the validity or morality of advice based on the holding of financial positions in the entity, area, place, type of investment, or anything else with which the advice was given.

How conflict-of-interest issues were to be addressed in any particular context was an issue that was left to the lawyers. And it was our practice to ourselves follow the guidelines or contracts which we signed. But there was no aura of wrongness of any kind that would be associated with providing advice on a financial issue in which one had an interest. (emphasis mine)

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“The Rush Limbaugh Show” is the most-listened-to talk radio program in the U.S., according to Arbitron, a consumer research company. The show is syndicated by media giant Clear Channel Communications, and most Americans probably live within range of an AM station that airs it for 3 hours each weekday. But it’s hard to accept that many of them would have agreed with the crude and degrading comments Limbaugh made last week about law student and women’s rights advocate Sandra Fluke.

Subsequent protests of Limbaugh’s comments have prompted 40+ companies to pull their advertising from “The Rush Limbaugh Show” in the past week. But many sponsors remain, and Rush claims that the protests to his remarks haven’t had any real impact.

To find out who is still advertising on Rush, we here at LittleSis tuned in to Rush’s program today (Wednesday, March 7) on our local station – Buffalo, NY’s WBEN “NewsRadio 930” – and recorded all businesses, national and local, that are effectively standing by the program. Here’s what we heard:

Buffalo area businesses

• Buffalo Men’s Health Practice – Amherst erectile dysfunction clinic
• Robert J. Meisner, DDS – East Aurora cosmetic dentistry practice
• Indoor Air Professionals - Lancaster HVAC company
• Niagara Fallsview Casino Resort
• Cellino and Barnes – Buffalo personal injury law firm
• Forest Lawn Cemetery
• Sheridan Surgical – Amherst home medical equipment supplier
• Reimer Heating & Air Conditioning – Tonawanda HVAC company

National businesses

• Winning Our Future – Newt Gingrich’s Super PAC
• Lowe’s Home Improvement
• Progressive
• State Farm Insurance
• LifeLock
• World Gym – four Buffalo area locations
• Constant Contact – stated on Tuesday that they would pull ads from Limbaugh’s show

If you’d like to let these businesses know how you feel about their sponsorship of Limbaugh’s program, Daily Kos has published a helpful action guide, “How to take action against Limbaugh at the local level.” (The comments to Part 2 suggest that some stations have already dropped “The Rush Limbaugh Show” this week in response to listener feedback.)

You can find out who owns your local radio station at FCCInfo.com. Buffalo’s WBEN is operated by Entercom, and its local contact information is as follows:

Sharon Metz, Director of Regional Sales

500 Corporate Parkway

Suite 200

Buffalo, NY  14226

(716) 843-0169

[email protected]

Among the recent large donors to Mitt Romney’s Super PAC Restore Our Future are still more corporations “not easily connected to a specific executive or even business,” Nicholas Confessore writes in a February 20 New York Times blog post. LittleSis has found that two of these new Romney backers, neither of whom the Times looked at in depth, derive their wealth from predatory, high-interest lending practices such as car title and payday loans. Both have drawn scrutiny for aggressively pursuing repayment, and both have records of making targeted political contributions to protect the laws that allow them to collect triple-digit interest from their mostly poor customers.

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Last month, LittleSis first reported that Mayor Bloomberg’s longtime partner, Diana Taylor, sits on the board of Brookfield Properties, which owns Zuccotti Park. The connection was subsequently noted in a number of media outlets, and Bloomberg was asked about it (ignoring obvious conflict of interest issues, he sidestepped by saying that “pillow talk” at his house was not about the protests).

New research shows that that kind of coziness extends a few steps down the food chain from the billionaire mayor and his ilk, to the Brookfield Properties security team and the NYPD, which have acted hand in hand to guard Zuccotti Park since the eviction on Tuesday. Research on Brookfield’s security apparatus shows that the company has strong ties to the NYPD, through current and former police officials.

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While the 99 percent occupy Wall Street, the one percent continue to occupy themselves with conferences, galas, fundraisers, luncheons, performances, and other events where they can enjoy each other’s company, network, do good works, and so on. Super-rich New Yorkers love to complain about the state’s taxes, but they simply cannot do without the social opportunities afforded to them by New York City. Where else can you rub elbows with fellow billionaires, take in high culture, and support your favorite causes, all at the same time, every night of the week?

In the spirit of efforts like the Sunlight Foundation’s politicalpartytime.org, we’ve decided to compile listings of these events and share them in the form of a One Percent’s Social Calendar. The calendar lists events around New York City that are expected to draw super-wealthy and powerful one percenters: people like Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, David Koch, real estate billionaire Jerry Speyer, Citigroup executive and former Obama OMB director Peter Orszag, austerity puppetmaster Pete Peterson, and many more. The calendar, which is below, was put together by LittleSis.org’s One Percent Watch research group.

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There are growing signs that the powers that be feel threatened by #OccupyWallStreet and the movement it has inspired. Yesterday, Andrew Ross Sorkin’s assignment editor at the New York Times big bank CEO friend asked him to check out the protests to see if they were a threat. Last week, Mayor Bloomberg was asked if he would let the protesters stay in the park, and he responded with an ambiguous “We’ll see” before absurdly taking the protesters to task for protesting “people who make $40,000 and $50,000 a year and are struggling to make ends meet.” And today, WNYC reported that NYPD sources are saying that an “indefinite” occupation of the Zuccotti Park is not an option, based on their talks with the park’s owner.

If the city moves to squash the revolt by evicting the protesters, Mayor Bloomberg and the owner of Zuccotti Park, Brookfield Properties, will be inviting a lot more attention from the occupiers, the press, and the public. The public-private partnership that controls the park has not received much scrutiny so far. An eviction would change that dramatically.

It has not been reported, for instance, that Bloomberg’s longtime, live-in girlfriend, Diana Taylor, sits on the board of Brookfield. The relationship gives a whole new meaning to the phrase “public-private partnership.” Numerous articles have noted that Brookfield owns the park and is in close contact with the city about the situation there, but oddly enough no one seems to have looked at its board (not hard to do). The connection should confirm, in case there was any question, that Bloomberg and the owner of the park are in constant communication.

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