By Dennis J. Seese aka sundin

Don Blankenship, CEO of Massey Energy — the company that owned the mine where disaster struck last week — notoriously commented to Forbes in 2003 that “we don’t pay much attention to the violation count” even though the same article went on to note that the company’s three biggest rivals mined “twice as much coal in the state as Massey” and were only cited 175 times collectively, as opposed to Massey’s 501 citations in 2000-2001. Blankenship chalked it up to Massey’s being “unfairly targeted” by regulators (a common theme). Yet, a member of West Virginia’s Surface Mining Board referred to one of the violations Massey wasn’t “paying attention to” in this time period as “absolutely the worst behavior by any company that any member of this board has ever seen over the decades that this board has been in existence.”

But, honestly, why should Mr. Blankenship pay attention to violations when he can buy sympathetic judges and friendly legislators adverse to enforcing, and in some cases favoring efforts to roll back, those unfortunate regulations?

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The Chamber of Commerce has led the fight against the financial reform bill making its way through Congress.  The business lobby opposes the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Agency, enhanced oversight of derivatives, and other key parts of the reform package, and it won many concessions on the bill recently passed by the House of Representatives.

Though the White House and the Chamber have been at loggerheads, recently, at least two members of President Obama’s inside circle teamed up with the Chamber in its efforts to fight financial reform.

Mellody Hobson, president of the mutual fund company Ariel Investments, and JP Morgan executive William Daley are both affiliated with the Chamber of Commerce’s Center for Capital Markets Competitiveness.  Both Daley and Hobson served on the Center’s predecessor committee and signed a letter from the Center urging the Obama administration to adopt Wall Street-friendly regulatory reform.  Hobson and Daley were two of the only Democrats to sign the letter, judging from campaign finance data; it’s an overwhelmingly Republican bunch.

As I noted in my previous post about Representative Melissa Bean’s ties to the Obama fundraisers, Daley and Hobson are both very close to the president.  Hobson has been raising money for him since 1995, is business partners with one of the first family’s closest friends, and campaigned side-by-side with Michelle Obama.  Daley was an adviser to the Obama transition and co-chair of the Obama inauguration.

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Now for some eye candy:  visualizations of the tabular data I shared in my last post on the US Chamber of Commerce board’s political networks and giving patterns.

I’m going to start with the strongest ties — the edges on the below graph mean that the donors they link have 14 or more recipients in common.*  The shorter the edge, the more ties in common.  The nodes are colored red for donors who give more than 80% of their contributions to Republicans, and pink for donors who give 60-80% of their contributions to Republicans.

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The Chamber of Commerce has had a challenging couple of weeks. The group has been under fire from all sides for its stance on climate change and other major policy issues. Change to Win, Eliot Spitzer, and Valerie Jarrett have all gotten in on the act. Mother Jones’ investigative team has been cranking on all cylinders, recently revealing that the Chamber had exaggerated its membership by a factor of ten (300,000, not 3 million as claimed). Several companies have defected, including Apple and Nike.

Yesterday, the Chamber managed to extend the media cycle by suing the Yes Men for impersonating them. In what could be mistaken as the grand finale to the Yes Men’s stunt, the Chamber claimed that the activists are greedy businessmen, not the “merry pranksters” they presume to be.

Chamber members are feeling a lot of heat, and the ones with weaker loyalties to Chamber CEO Thomas Donohue and his agenda are probably considering going the way of Apple. But who are they? As the Chamber splinters, who will stay and who will go?

Using LittleSis data and a bit of social network analysis, I think we can make some predictions.

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