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.

The ties further illustrate the extent to which the NYPD has been captured by big business interests, building on recent criticism of “rent-a-cops” and JPMorgan Chase’s massive donation to the NYPD. Retired Philadelphia police captain Ray Lewis, who is participating in the protests in New York and was arrested today, has called the NYPD “Wall Street mercenaries” who are being exploited to protect the interests of the 1%.

Brookfield’s ties to the NYPD start at the top of its security team: Director of Security Ralph Blasi previously worked for the NYPD for 22 years before taking the job at Brookfield Properties. Blasi appears to be the individual at the beginning of this video from Zuccotti Park on Tuesday, who does not identify himself when asked but does say he works for Brookfield. Later in the video, one of Blasi’s contractors calls the interviewer, Joey Boots, a “faggot.” That private security contractor has since been fired, to Brookfield’s credit.

Ralph Blasi, director of security for Brookfield Properties.

Blasi’s name has not appeared in recent media coverage of Brookfield and the Occupy protests. In the past he has received significant media attention for his role in devising a successful evacuation plan for One World Financial Center employees on 9/11. He is also a prominent player in the elite corporate security-NYPD nexus, serving on the host committee for a Police Athletic League luncheon in early October which honored JPMorgan Chase Consumer Bank head Ryan McInerney. The list of host committee members is here, and includes New York City elites such as Fred Wilpon, the owner of the Mets, who is under investigation for his firm’s ties to Bernie Madoff; a number of real estate kingpins, including Aby Rosen, George Kaufman, and Daniel Rose; and representatives of JPMorgan Chase, Silverstein Properties, and CB Richard Ellis. Police Commissioner Ray Kelly is the honorary chairman of the Police Athletic League.

One of Brookfield’s private security contractors, MSA Security (formerly Michael Stapleton Associates), has even stronger ties to the NYPD. MSA Security, which advertises itself as being “In the business of business as usual,” listed Brookfield Properties on its website until a few days ago, but the client list has since been taken down. The google cache is available here. MSA’s clients in the financial sector include AIG, Goldman Sachs, NYSE Euronext (the stock exchange), and Bank of America. It also provides security services to Fox News and a number of real estate firms, including World Trade Center site developer Silverstein Properties.

MSA VP of Operations Hugh O’Rourke confirmed that his firm is retained by Brookfield, but declined to comment on the nature of the services or whether it was playing a role at Zuccotti, citing MSA company policy. MSA lists services such as “executive protection” and “threat and risk assessments” on its website, though the focus of much of its work appears to be bomb detection. Brookfield Properties has not responded to requests for comment.

MSA’s leadership includes many former NYPD officials. At least eight MSA executives list former NYPD affiliations in their bios — about a third of the firm. (MSA also took down pages with biographies of its leadership team and operations team earlier this week. Google caches of those pages are available here and here.)

Specifically, the firm has strong ties to the NYPD’s counterterrorism division. O’Rourke previously served as executive officer there. MSA’s president, Michael O’Neil, was the first commanding officer of the NYPD’s counterterrorism division following 9/11, according to his bio. Governor Cuomo recently appointed O’Neil to chair the New York Security Guard Advisory Council. Two other MSA executives, Patrick Devlin and John Quinn, also worked in the counterterrorism division.

On the other side of the revolving door, current NYPD Deputy Commissioner for Operations Patrick Timlin is a former employee of MSA Security, having worked there from 2004 to 2009, between stints at the NYPD. Timlin oversaw the internal review of the Amadou Diallo killing as Assistant Chief in 2001, which found that the officers who fired 41 shots at the unarmed Diallo were acting within police guidelines. Timlin gives MSA and its high-powered clients a contact in the upper echelons of the NYPD leadership.

MSA seems to have profited from the financial crisis to some extent by offering security services to financial firms that perceive heightened security risk due to public anger about the bailouts. In an article about the AIG bonuses in 2009, the New York Times quoted Timlin about corporate executives’ security fears and suggested that MSA had experienced an increase in business:

But several security companies in New York credited the financial crisis with a noticeable increase in some areas of their business, from protecting executives to dispatching bomb-sniffing dogs to check for trouble. “There is certainly anger among people about the economy and fear among corporate executives themselves,” said Mr Patrick Timlin, the president of Michael Stapleton Associates, which provides bomb-dog teams.

MSA Security may or may not be involved in operations at Zuccotti Park. Regardless, its roster suggests that a lucrative future awaits top NYPD officials who are willing to become “Wall Street mercenaries” and go to work for major financial firms and real estate interests like Brookfield Properties. The connections raise further troubling questions about the privatization of security and policing: who is the NYPD really working for when these sorts of incentives are on the table? Do former officials hold on to special access and privileges after they retire, which they leverage for the benefit of firms like Brookfield? How many NYPD officers are working for companies like Brookfield and MSA when they are off-duty? Of course, this is all part of the broader dynamic that Occupy Wall Street is protesting: a government takeover by corporate interests that has put one-percenters like Mayor Bloomberg in the driver’s seat. We’ll continue to follow that takeover here at LittleSis.

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.

Tonight, for example, the Aspen Institute is honoring News Corp senior executive Joel Klein at its annual dinner at the Plaza Hotel (Newark Mayor Cory Booker and Madeleine Albright will also be receiving awards). As Chancellor of the New York City Schools until 2010, Klein was a controversial figure due to his emphasis on school testing and charter schools. The Aspen Institute is giving Klein a “public leadership” award, though Klein has been at scandal-plagued News Corp for close to a year. Klein initially served as vice president of education technology, part of News Corp’s plans to enter the education privatization business, but Rupert Murdoch charged him with cleaning up the hacking mess a few months ago.

Coincidentally, the New York Post, owned by News Corp, used its front page today to tell Mayor Bloomberg to end the occupation of Zuccotti Park.

Check the calendar below for more events. Event details include venue, one percenters expected to attend, and a website with more info. Please send tips about events, corrections, and other suggestions to onepercentnyc@gmail.com (though all info as of now is from public sources). And feel free to embed the calendar on your own site.

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.

Bloomberg's longtime, live-in girlfriend, Diana Taylor, sits on the board of Brookfield Properties, which owns the park that Wall Street protesters are occupying.

Taylor is an investment banker and prominent New York City fundraiser. She joined the board of Brookfield in 2007 following a stint as New York State’s Superintendent of Banks. She currently works at Wolfensohn, an investment firm run by former World Bank head James Wolfensohn, and also sits on the board of Citigroup. Taylor and Bloomberg met, fittingly enough, at a Citizens Budget Commission luncheon in 2001. The Citizens Budget Commission is a committee of elites committed to financial austerity, i.e. tax cuts for the 1%, service and job cuts for everyone else. A group of bankers founded it during the Depression to fight for this brand of fiscal seriousness in New York City.

Coincidentally, Taylor has been the subject of a spate of puff pieces in recent weeks, including a New York Times article, a Talk of the Town piece in the New Yorker, and a New York Observer feature. None have mentioned her ties to the owner of Zuccotti Park (though the Observer piece mentions that she sits on the board of Brookfield).

Taylor has taken some flack for criticizing Obama in the Observer piece, at one point invoking Sarah Palin by saying that he hasn’t come through on his “hopey-changey stuff.” According to Crain’s, her comments “surprised insiders” given her partner’s more neutral position and the protocol that typically governs high-powered fundraisers for charity. One lobbyist speculated that her comments positioned her for a role in a Republican administration, which may explain all the press. She also sounded off about the Dodd Frank financial reform legislation, speaking from the neutral standpoint of someone who made $286,250 last year as a director Citigroup.

The cozy, overlooked relationship between Bloomberg and Brookfield, and Brookfield’s ownership of Zuccotti Park, highlights the very dynamic #OccupyWallStreet is protesting: the control of public resources, and government itself, by the wealthy and powerful – the 1%. The occupiers have taken an important first step towards correcting this imbalance. The message is resonating and the movement is growing. If Bloomberg & Brookfield (LLP) move to re-assert 1% control of the park, it could really backfire on them. If they attempt to shut down the protesters by cutting off supplies, or implementing restrictions designed to make life in the park impossible in cold weather, it could really backfire on them. And Andrew Ross Sorkin’s assignment editor would not like that.

***

Note: I set up a LittleSis research group today for folks interested in conducting research on 1% networks, in solidarity with (and in order to assist) the occupiers and the broader movement against finance capital they have inspired. If you don’t have an account yet, use this link to sign up. I haven’t settled on any specific research questions to tackle just yet, but if you have any thoughts, join the group and write a note.

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.

To use the bookmarklet, drag this link to your bookmarks toolbar:

LittleSis Bookmarklet (don’t click it, drag it to your toolbar)

The bookmarklet can only be used by advanced users on LittleSis. Log in and check your homepage to make sure you have the “Importer” credential, and contact us if you don’t but would like to use the bookmarklet. And if you’re not yet an analyst but want to sign up, go here.

As you’re reading an article, clicking the bookmarklet will bring up a box at the top of the browser window. If you were reading the Gingrich article, it would look like this:

The LittleSis bookmarklet, shown as an overlay on an article about Newt Gingrich's wife. The two search boxes allow you to find entities in the LittleSis database and create new relationships between them.

You can use the bookmarklet to search for entities named in the article, optionally create new entities if they do not yet exist in the database, and create relationships noted in the article.

For instance, I used the bookmarklet to search for Newt Gingrich’s wife, Callista Beck. It turned out she wasn’t in the database yet, so I used the LittleSis bookmarklet to add her to the database and create a “family” relationship between her and her husband. The reference link that is required for all LittleSis edits was automatically created by the bookmarklet.

Though news stories are the most obvious use case, the bookmarklet can be used on any web page you visit to pull up contextual info on individuals or organizations or add info to the LittleSis database.

Please note! The bookmarklet may be a bit buggy, depending on your browser and operating system and the site you are trying to use it on. Please contact us if you have any problems or questions. We can’t promise that we’ll be able to make it compatible with every setup, but we’ll try.

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

Of the big banks, Bank of America has the most tax haven subsidiaries, with 371 (and 204 in the Cayman Islands alone), according to its most recent SEC filings. 48.8% of Bank of America’s foreign subsidiaries are in tax havens.

Goldman Sachs has far fewer foreign subsidiaries, but of those, 75% are located in tax haven countries. Its two favorite tax havens are the Cayman Islands with 17 and Mauritius with 9.

The report found that all of this helped the six banks avoid $13 billion in taxes over the past two years, 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.

Two banks stick out as particularly bad:

Bank of America recorded a $666 million tax refund for 2010, which we deemed the “tax refund from hell.” Bank of America booked a paper loss in 2010, but only because of a non-deductible $12 billion writedown called a “goodwill impairment charge.” Essentially, it wrote down the value of its credit card brand. Without the writedown, Bank of America would have booked positive pre-tax earnings in 2010 of over $10 billion. Depending on how the loss was split between its US and foreign businesses, it seems likely that Bank of America should have paid $1-2 billion in US taxes. Instead, it got a refund.

It may help that Bank of America director Charles O. Rossotti is a former IRS commissioner.

Perhaps more egregiously, Wells Fargo is paying a federal income tax rate of -6.8% for the bailout years of 2009 and 2010, despite booking pre-tax earnings of $37 billion. In other words, Wells Fargo recorded tax refunds of $2.5 billion in those years, despite being immensely profitable.

For your tax day perusal, here are two tables from the report with tax haven information, each based on our analysis of exhibit 21s from the bank’s SEC 2010 10-k filings (annual reports). The full report is here.

 
Table 6: Big Bank Subsidiaries in Foreign Countries and Tax Havens

 
Table 8: Bank Subsidiaries Incorporated in Offshore Tax Havens

Source: SEC 2010 10-k filings (annual reports), exhibit 21 – list of subsidiaries – for each bank. Accessed at SEC EDGAR.

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:

Tishman Speyer

30 Rock is owned by the real estate firm Tishman Speyer, which put up $1 million in funding for the Committee and was a top donor to Cuomo. Rob Speyer, Tishman Speyer’s co-CEO, is also co-chair of the Committee and one of its key founders.

Rob Speyer

Tishman Speyer has been involved in a number of publicly-subsidized development deals, including the new Yankees stadium, which received $663.5 million in taxpayer subsidies, according to Good Jobs First. In 2006, the Village Voice found that the Yankees had billed city taxpayers for Tishman Speyer’s lobbyists, as part of a deal with the Giuliani administration where the city agreed to pay the planning costs of the new stadium.

More recently, the New York Fed agreed to bail out several Tishman Speyer properties in Chicago with a favorable debt restructuring, in what the company celebrated as “great news.” The company had fallen on somewhat hard times following the 2008 financial crisis when it defaulted on loans and had to walk away from Stuyvesant Town (where it had made many enemies). Several New York Fed board members sit on the Partnership for New York City’s board with Rob Speyer including Partnership CEO Kathryn Wylde, another Committee co-founder, and so the unusual agreement to backstop a billionaire’s real estate concern with public funds from the Fed was merely a handshake between friends.

Lazard

Lazard, an investment bank known for its mergers and acquisitions work, has been a tenant at 30 Rock since 1993. Felix Rohatyn, the honorary chair of the Committee to Save New York, is a top executive there and was a longtime partner before his current stint, which began early last year (from 2006-2008, Rohatyn was an adviser to Dick Fuld, the CEO of that spectacular Wall Street failure, Lehman Brothers).

Felix Rohatyn

Tax avoidance appears to be in the firm’s DNA: Rohatyn’s mentor, the late Andre Meyer, pioneered the use of the real estate tax shelter, according to Cary Reich’s biography of him, Financier: The Biography of Andre Meyer. Meyer, Reich writes, realized the tax benefits associated with real estate long before most other bankers did. Meyer was a longtime confidant and business partner of David Rockefeller, whose family still keeps offices in 30 Rock.

In his book on Lazard, The Last Tycoons, William Cohan notes that many Lazard partners enjoyed lunching at the exclusive Rockefeller Center Club atop 30 Rock:

This was the ultimate – a scrumptious buffet of gourmet salads, fresh shrimp, and filet mignon, an uninterrupted view south of lower Manhattan, and the private companionship of numerous corporate CEOs and Wall Street bankers and attorneys. There was no bill or menu, just a warm greeting from the maitre d’ and the quiet comfort of exclusivity. Maybe the appeal of the Rockefeller Center Club was nothing more complicated than Fitzgerald’s observation of the ‘consoling proximity of millionaires.’ (emphasis mine)

The Rockefeller Center Club was also a favorite lunch spot of Citigroup chairman Dick Parsons, an original founder of the Committee to Save New York, along with many other high rollers in New York City. You could imagine the plot for the Committee being hatched there over filet mignon, but it closed in 2009 after a dispute with its landlord, Tishman Speyer.

NBC/GE/Comcast

The building’s most famous tenant is NBC, owned by GE until recently, and now a joint venture of GE and Comcast. NBC and GE have a number of close ties to the Partnership for New York City. Lazard and Rohatyn have also worked closely with GE over the years, and helped it engineer its takeover of RCA during the 1980s.

Jeff Immelt

Those deals, however, pale in comparison to the publicly-funded bailout financing that NBC’s parent, GE, got from the New York Fed during the financial crisis: $16.1 billion in emergency loans. Incredibly, GE CEO Jeff Immelt sat on the New York Fed’s board at the time, essentially overseeing his own company’s bailout. Another Fed board member, Loews CEO James Tisch, joined GE’s board in June 2010. Tisch is also a director of the Partnership for New York City and husband of Merryl Tisch, chancellor of the New York State Board of Regents.

This only scratches the surface of GE’s lengthy record as a corporate welfare recipient; as Matthew noted recently, the conflicts of interest surrounding GE’s business dealings are deep and ugly with all the attendant benefits.

***

By going to 30 Rock, Cuomo is tapping the corporate gravy train that fills the coffers of Tishman Speyer, GE, Lazard, et al, robs the state of much-needed revenue, and causes budget shortfalls. Cuomo will put these funds to work protecting their tax breaks and promoting the absurd notion that public sector workers caused our budget problems, despite the obvious role of highly-leveraged, bailed-out financial conglomerates like GE and Tishman Speyer in sinking the economy in the first place. The corporate power elite perpetuates itself through a vicious cycle. Cuomo seems to have gone along for the ride, and unless he faces something along the lines of a Wisconsin moment, he is unlikely to turn back.

A portrait of the business interests behind the Committee to Save New York (click through to see the full-size image, and check back later for names).

The class portrait includes Committee to Save New York board members as well as the directors of three business associations tightly linked to the Committee: the Real Estate Board of New York (REBNY), a coalition of real estate developers and owners; the Partnership for New York City (“the Partnership”), which was formed out of a merger of the city’s longtime chamber of commerce and an elite business association founded by Chase Manhattan chair David Rockefeller in 1979; and the Business Council of New York State, the voice of (big) business in state affairs.

Kathryn Wylde, the CEO of the Partnership for New York City, was widely reported to be at the center of efforts to organize the Committee, perhaps more than any other individual. She and the Partnership convened a sort of early precursor to the Committee, a September 2009 business summit on budget issues that was held in the offices of JPMorgan Chase, with CEO Jamie Dimon, a Partnership board member, playing host. That year the group, according to Wylde, settled on pushing a “constructively anti-tax” message in response to the state’s budget ills.

Financial and business elites like Dimon had reason to be anxious about budget and taxation issues at the time. Earlier in the year, shortly on the heels of the financial crisis, Albany had passed a “millionaire’s tax” on high income earners. The New York Times called it a sign of a “new balance of power” in Albany that favored Democrats, unions, and liberal groups. Working Families Party chair Dan Cantor declared that “the era of phony prosperity has ended.” The tax spurred Paychex founder Tom Golisano to leave the state in an act of billionaire protest.

Wylde’s work to organize the Committee to Save New York in the past several months is a more sophisticated form of billionaire protest, but a billionaire protest just the same: the Partnership’s board boasts 11 members of Forbes’ list of the Richest 400 Americans in 2010, more than any other organization in LittleSis.org’s database. Among them are John Paulson, the hedge fund manager who reaped billions by setting up faulty subprime securities in partnership with Goldman Sachs; Stephen Schwarzman, CEO of the Blackstone Group, who famously threw a lavish 60th birthday party for himself shortly before the financial crisis; buyout king Henry Kravis; News Corp CEO Rupert Murdoch; real estate magnate Jerry Speyer; and, of course Rockefeller himself. (the full list is here)

Big bank CEOs like Citigroup’s Vikram Pandit, Goldman Sachs’ Lloyd Blankfein, and Dimon are the billionaires’ junior partners on the Partnership’s board, worth piddling hundreds of millions. Roughly half the CEOs on the board are employed in the finance, insurance, and real estate sector (FIRE), or as accessories to FIRE in the accounting and law professions, reflecting the mix – or lack thereof – of New York City’s economy.

In other words, the Partnership’s board is packed with wealthy individuals who made their money through the kind of highly-leveraged financial speculation that crashed the economy in 2008 and caused the current budget and unemployment crisis. In advocating for spending cuts over taxation as the way to resolve the budget crisis, Wylde, the Committee, and Cuomo – who wants to let 2009’s millionaire tax expire, in spite of its popularity – are protecting this immense wealth and power.

Wylde performs a similar function as a board member of the New York Federal Reserve, which has extended hundreds of billions of dollars in bailouts to the financial firms that employ Wylde at the Partnership (Wylde joined the board in mid-2009, after the worst of the crisis had passed, but at a time when several large firms still required aid). Several other Partnership directors hold top leadership positions at the New York Fed, including Dimon and James Tisch of Loews Corp, both board members, and William Dudley, the president, who is an ex officio member of the Partnership’s board and a former Goldman Sachs executive.

The New York Fed – and its shadow NGO, the Partnership – exemplifies the “Committee” model of governance: a small group of crony capitalists, impervious to the influence of the electorate, looking out for each other and disregarding the consequences for everyone else. The Committee to Save New York is a clear attempt to bring this style of governance to the state budget process, and it is highly reminiscent of an earlier committee, appointed by Governor Hugh Carey to resolve New York City’s fiscal crisis in 1975. This appears to be by design.

That committee was composed of bankers and businessmen, led by investment banker Felix Rohatyn – now the honorary chair of the Committee to Save New York – with David Rockefeller and several other bankers acting as informal advisers. Less than a year after they came together, the New York Magazine declared that nothing less than a “bloodless revolution” had occurred, and that the “city is now being governed by a committee.” The committee successfully pushed for major concessions from labor unions, layoffs, and reforms targeting social spending, such as free tuition at City College.

Rohatyn has hailed that coalition’s breadth due to the involvement of labor unions, but it is clear that his labor allies were playing second fiddle to the banks, their leadership confused and possibly coopted. It is, perhaps, illuminating that Rohatyn would hire the son of his strongest labor ally, DC 37 head Victor Gotbaum, to work as a banker at Lazard in 1981.

The 1970s kicked off a new era of major subsidies for big businesses in New York City, where large, profitable companies were granted generous tax breaks in return for staying in the city. The second major force behind the Committee to Save New York, the Real Estate Board of New York, has benefited tremendously from this system. REBNY, as it is called, is an association of New York City real estate firms, including most of the city’s top developers and real estate owners. Subsidies to the city’s large tenants naturally get passed through to the city’s large landlords. This dynamic is an important part of the close relationship between the big business interests represented by the Partnership and the big developers represented by REBNY (the organizations share five board members). And with five billionaires on its board, REBNY has a great deal of wealth to protect from taxation.

Press reports on the Committee’s origins frequently credit REBNY’s chair, Mary Ann Tighe of CB Richard Ellis, president, Steven Spinola, and executive committee member, Rob Speyer, as key players in the founding of the Committee to Save New York, and all have joined the board. Speyer’s firm, Tishman Speyer, also reportedly put up $1 million to fund the Committee.

Also funding the Committee is the Durst Organization, run by REBNY board member Douglas D Durst, which obtained $650 million in tax-exempt “liberty bonds” to erect the Bank of America tower on Bryant Park in 2003. This is just one example of many large public expenditures that have subsidized the fortunes of REBNY and Partnership members and other large businesses. Wylde and REBNY board member Mario Palumbo both sit on the board of the New York City Economic Development Corporation, which oversees (committee-style) elements of this system of corporate subsidies.

The economic development model that came to dominate during the 1970s – tax breaks for big businesses, rather than public investment in infrastructure and services – is still in full force, and there are no signs that it will change during the Cuomo administration. The Governor recently nominated Ken Adams, head of the Business Council of New York State, to lead the Empire State Development Corporation, the state’s main economic development arm. Adams was reported to have played a leading role in forming the Committee, but has stepped down due to his nomination as ESDC president and CEO. The Business Council’s board includes representatives of many large businesses upstate, but also has significant overlap with the Partnership (if not REBNY): five members of its board sit on the Partnership’s board, including its chair, Con Edison CEO Kevin Burke. The Business Council has been a leader in pushing for the current model: tax breaks for big business, at the expense of everyone else.

The portrait could be expanded to include more peripheral players on the Committee – regional chambers or the New York City building trades – but most of the key characters are there. It is important to look at the power structure behind the Committee, and not just the named affiliates. If you just looked at Wylde, you might miss the bankers that employ her; if you focused on La Barbera, you’d miss the elite group of business leaders that form the Committee’s core of support.

From the larger portrait, a composite sketch of New York State’s austerity advocate emerges: immensely wealthy, with vast personal riches to protect from politicians and the public; responsible for crashing the economy through speculative and fraudulent investment practices; bailed out, or in charge of the bailouts, or possibly both; insatiably hungry for tax breaks and public dollars; and reigning over New York State politics since the 1970s, when a self-appointed committee ushered in an era of financialization and growing inequality in New York’s economy.

Common sense would dictate opposition to any economic platform that finds its most fervent support from this sort of individual, and would instead target their subsidies, tax breaks, and bailout-generated wealth in order to raise revenue to fund the budget. But Governor Cuomo has joined hands with the austerity committee, issuing a budget that pairs tax cuts for millionaires with budget cuts for college students, schoolchildren, veterans, the elderly, and the homeless. The press and the power elite have settled on a public enemy number one: the public employee. And everything seems to be falling into place for the austerity committee, which plans to spend millions in support of budget cuts.

But they are still in an insecure position, as they were in 2009 when Wylde convened that anti-tax summit at JPMorgan: they are sitting on publicly-subsidized riches that could really save New York. Will New York realize?

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.

Immelt and Obama talking business in a GE factory

After $40 million in lobbying last year, more than any other company, the returns on GE’s political investments are still flowing. Immelt was with Obama in India a few months ago when he negotiated a $10 billion export deal benefitting GE, and Obama stood at a GE plant in New York as he named Immelt to lead his new economic advisory council, which looks like it will focus on making America’s laws, taxes, and labor force even more business-friendly.

Interestingly, the deep conflicts surrounding Obama’s promotion of Immelt have provoked the strongest criticism from libertarian think tank FreedomWorks, which has close ties to the billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch. The Kochs are energy moguls notorious for their financing of dozens of free-market political forces, from free-market think tanks to Tea Party affiliates. Jane Mayer’s New Yorker article about the Koch brothers shows how their influence through political and nonprofit financing is both unequalled and self-interested. The Kochs are fiercely opposed to bank bailouts, economic stimulus, and climate regulation. Immelt has been a high-profile supporter of all of these — perhaps because they’ve profited GE — and GE’s campaign contributions have leaned Democratic in recent years. That’s probably why he’s so close to Obama, and why the Koch brothers and groups like FreedomWorks want him to go away.

FreedomWorks and the NCPPR, another free-market think tank, have launched a campaign to “dethrone” Immelt from GE, calling him the “king of crony capitalism”, and are running ads attacking Immelt’s conflicts of interest as a blatant sign of corruption. “It’s time to break up the unethical romance between government and big business,” said FreedomWorks President Matt Kibbe in a statement. “For too long, corporate elites have lobbied to profit from the size and growth of government at the expense of hard-working Americans.”

FreedomWorks has it wrong. It’s not the size and growth of government that ensured minimal financial regulations and generous bailouts for well-connected banks like GE Capital, it’s the size and growth of finance and its influence over government. Relative to expanding financial markets, regulations and regulatory bodies are not growing, they’re shrinking. Still, FreedomWorks can apparently exploit anger about Obama’s dirty dancing with bailed-out corporate elites to rally support for further dismantling of government oversight and regulation.

The beast of corporate power is feeding off its own corruption.

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.

It is already clear that one of the main forces behind the Committee is the Real Estate Board of New York (REBNY), an industry association comprised of wealthy real estate and financial interests. REBNY’s president, Steven Spinola, and chair, Mary Ann Tighe, are on the board of the Committee, and Committee co-chair Rob Speyer is on REBNY’s executive committee. Speyer’s real estate firm, Tishman Speyer, has reportedly donated $1 million to the Committee, and other members of REBNY’s board have also donated to the Committee, including chair emeritus Stephen Ross (a billionaire) and the Durst Organization (Douglas Durst is on REBNY’s board).

REBNY’s board boasts many super-wealthy real estate investors and bankers, including billionaires Richard LeFrak, Stephen Ross, Leonard Stern, Sheldon Solow, and Jerry Speyer. Large real estate management firms like CB Richard Ellis, conglomerates such as Vornado Realty Trust, law firms such as Weil Gotshal Manges, and financial firms such as Barclays gain a voice in government through REBNY.

REBNY’s annual reports do not exactly paint a picture of an organization intent on tackling the state’s budget problems or easing the tax burden of the middle class. The reports detail a range of lobbying activities intended to lower the tax burden of big business and the super-rich, including advocating for equal income tax rates for billionaires and bus drivers, a continued “carried interest” tax break for hedge funds and real estate investment firms, and a continued tax abatement for condo owners in Manhattan. “Fiscal discipline,” in REBNY’s world, appears to mean helping wealthy, big business interests avoid paying taxes.

What does the Committee actually stand for?

Judging from press reports, REBNY has a direct line to Cuomo’s office, but that has come at a high price: 26 of the organization’s board members donated $10,000 or more to his gubernatorial campaign, an incredible level of support from one organization.

There is much more research to be done on REBNY and other groups associated with the Committee. Who are they? What do they lobby for in Albany? What aspects of the budget and tax code benefit them? Do they pay their taxes?

Is this the Committee to Save New York, or the Committee to Scam New York? Join the research group to help us find out.

Note: For analysts who are more interested in the shadowy ways of Washington, Sunlight Foundation is leading an exciting investigation of Super PACs, the outside groups made possible by Citizens United that spent hundreds of millions of dollars influencing last year’s election. Go here to sign up for the research group and research a few Super PACs: where are they located? Who are their main officers? Do they have a website? Help us find out.