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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Lots of important information on powerful people and organizations and their connections is found in news stories. Read today’s New York Times, for instance, and you’ll find pieces on Newt Gingrich’s wife and the Shriver-Schwarzenegger separation. The Wall Street Journal has a lot of detail on Microsoft’s acquisition of Skype, and who the bankers were. These are good articles to “LittleSis” – to read, pull out the interesting relationships, and add them to LittleSis.

The new LittleSis bookmarklet allows you to add relationships to (and pull up contextual info from) LittleSis easily, as you read the news, without ever having to click away from the article you’re reading. In other words, the bookmarklet helps you, as a LittleSis analyst, bypass the annoyance of clicking back and forth between tabs as you add info to LittleSis; all the editing can happen right there, on the page you’re reading.

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A few stats for tax day, drawn from our recent study of big banks and tax avoidance, Big Bank Tax Drain, produced in partnership with National People’s Action as part of its Make Wall Street Pay campaign.

The report found that 50% of the six big banks’ foreign subsidiaries are located in tax haven jurisdictions.

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Governor Cuomo is hosting a $15,000-a-head fundraiser at the Top of the Rock tonight to raise money for a “likely battle with special interest groups” over his budget agenda. The location is appropriate because 30 Rockefeller Plaza (”30 Rock”) is owned by – and host to – some of the leading lights of the Committee to Save New York, the big business lobby that has come together to back Cuomo in his fight for tax cuts for the wealthy and budget cuts for everyone else.

30 Rock also brings together some of Committee’s – and New York’s – most notable corporate welfare cases, extremely wealthy people and companies who still want more: more handouts, more bailouts, more tax breaks, more loopholes. A quick and dirty review of some of the key players at the building, and how they profit at public expense:

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Governor Andrew Cuomo’s austerity budget has won the backing of a coalition of business interests named the “Committee to Save New York,” which LittleSis analysts have been researching as part of our Cuomo Watch investigation. Together, we have put together the beginnings of a portrait of the Committee to Save New York, class of 2011. Click through for the full-size image:

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Billionaires Charles and David Koch are holding one of their infamous political retreats this weekend in Rancho Mirage, CA, inspiring a coalition of liberal groups to mount protests outside the event. Common Cause, the principal organizer, is calling the event “Uncloaking the Kochs,” to “counter an exclusive gathering of corporate billionaires.”

David Koch.

Who are these corporate billionaires? Last year, Think Progress got its hands on the attendee list and put it online. It has since been uploaded to LittleSis. Many of the same folks will probably show up this year.

What are the corporate, social, and political ties that bind the Koch network participants? Some common links can be seen in the interlocks and giving tabs, but there is much more to dig up.

Analysts: Consider shedding light on the contours of the Koch network by building out the profiles of some past attendees. (and if you aren’t an analyst, go here to sign up).

Update: Here is a giant wall of pictures of the Koch conference attendees.

In a prelude to the looming budget battle, a shadowy group going by the name of the “Committee to Save New York” has started coordinating with the Cuomo administration to promote the dawning of a new era of “fiscal sanity” in New York State. The group has amassed a $10 million war chest to run ads in support of a fiscal reform agenda heavy on budget cuts. One ad has already gone on the air touting Cuomo’s approach to the state’s budget problems.

Who, exactly, is behind the Committee to Save New York? To find out, LittleSis’s Cuomo Watch research group will be investigating over the course of the next month. The Committee has refused to disclose its donor list, but it has released its board list, and we have already added that info to the Committee’s page on LittleSis. We will be using that and other public record information to shed light on who, exactly, is behind these efforts, and what their true agendas and interests are.

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“So here is the evidence for an American plutocracy of a narrow and discrete but hardly harmless sort. Wall Street seduced the economics profession not through overt corruption, but by aligning the incentives of economists with its own. It was very easy for academic economists to move from universities to central banks to hedge funds — a tightly knit world in which everyone shared the same views about the self-regulating and beneficial effects of open capital markets. The alliance was enormously profitable for everyone: The academics got big consulting fees, and Wall Street got legitimacy. And it has kept the system going despite the enormous policy failures it has generated, not to exclude the recent crisis.”
—Francis Fukuyama, The American Interest, January 2011

Larry Summers’ path to the Obama administration, and his record within it, are symptomatic of a new American plutocracy, and his new job at Harvard will keep the gears of corruption greased.

Summers rose to power under the protective wing of Wall Street and Democratic Party mogul Robert Rubin. He aggressively advanced Rubin’s program of financial deregulation and faithfully rescued his cronies when deregulation went wrong. Despite the economic catastrophes these policies have contributed to, Summers and other Rubinites have continued their political ascendancy in recent years, filling top positions in the Obama administration.

Obama’s economic program, developed almost entirely by Rubin’s proteges, has received widespread popular condemnation for bailing out Wall Street while leaving Main Street out in the cold. Summers has become a defining symbol of the latest sold-out administration within a sold-out system of government. His departure from the White House is more a reflection of this public anger than a personal career choice.

But strategic sensitivity is not change. Summers’ exit does not significantly diminish Rubin’s shadow over the White House, nor does it mark an end or pause in the vicious cycle of today’s crony capitalism. Obama has replaced Summers with a less notorious Rubinite, and the Harvard research center Summers will now direct provides a name-brand intellectual cover for, not an alternative to, the dangerously insular politics his career has thus far embodied.

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