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.

I. Early Warning Signs

Timmermeyer’s career trajectory is a lesson in the spoils that come with corporate hackery. In 1999, while still attending law school, she was a legal intern for the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection. Two years later she was the department’s air quality director, and two years after that she became the youngest-ever holder of the state’s top environmental job, Secretary of the DEP.

What propelled this rapid ascent? Her qualifications were a bit thin for someone ostensibly working to *protect* the environment. Before joining the DEP as air quality director, she had done a stint at the law firm Spilman, Thomas & Battle, which has defended chemical manufacturer DuPont against countless charges of extreme environmental negligence. In the course of her work there, Timmermeyer had represented DuPont in cases involving air and water pollution by C8, a toxic chemical. Prior to graduating law school, she had worked as a project manager for Potesta & Associates, an environmental consulting firm also frequently retained by DuPont. Before law school, she’d worked at American Electric Power overseeing utility line-clearing crews.

At the time Timmermeyer became the head of environmental protection in West Virginia, all three of these former employers were represented on the Environmental Committee of the state’s pro-business Chamber of Commerce, along with officials from chemical-producing giants Dow and BASF as well as the West Virginia Petroleum Council.

Apparently, corporate connections trumped strong credentials when it came time to pick a DEP Secretary. Notably, Timmermeyer got the top job despite the candidacy of a WVU law professor and career environmental and public-interest advocate, who additionally had the support of six state and regional environmental groups for the position. “I’m sure everybody is tired of hearing about my background” was her breezy reply to worries about regulatory capture – it’s unfortunate that the people of West Virginia heard too little about Timmermeyer and her loyalties before she was appointed.

II. A “Hand Puppet” for DuPont?

DuPont seemed to be quite happy with the new DEP secretary. A company attorney’s internal memo that came to light during a class-action pollution and negligence lawsuit doesn’t mention Timmermeyer by name, but clearly implies that her past work for both Dupont and their consultants Potesta & Associates would win out over her obligation to regulate their handling of toxic spill cleanup jobs:

We have a great relationship with Potesta. They have a very deep relationship with the WVDEP. They have every reason to be helpful to DuPont. The key will be to maintaining [sic] day to day communications, regardless of who “on paper” is the LRS [Licensed Remediation Specialist, a DEP-certified supervisor of cleanup operations whose "overriding duty ... is to protect the safety, health and welfare of the public"].

While Timmermeyer was air quality director, the DEP actually spiked a release warning residents about toxic emissions from a DuPont plant, under pressure from the company. The Charleston Gazette noted her ties to the company:

In early March 2002, state environmental regulators planned to warn Wood County residents that the toxic chemical C8 was spreading across the area through air emissions from DuPont Co.’s Parkersburg plant. … But the public never got that news. The DEP killed its release after complaints from a DuPont lawyer, according to records obtained under the federal Freedom of Information Act. … Before joining state government [in 2001], DEP Secretary Stephanie Timmermeyer was a lawyer at [DuPont rep Ann] Bradley’s firm. Timmermeyer helped DuPont draft the 2001 consent order with the DEP, records show. (Charleston Gazette, July 2005, “DuPont lawyer edited DEP’s C8 media releases”)

Timmermeyer had been on the DuPont end of a similar exchange in the past; in a deposition, a former DEP spokesman testified that as a lawyer for Spilman/DuPont, prior to joining the DEP, she had once called him and asked him to change a press release.

Attorney Robert Kennedy, Jr later zeroed in on Timmermeyer’s ties to DuPont during the trial for a lawsuit against the company, calling her a DuPont “hand puppet”:

DuPont manipulated state environmental regulators and lied to residents about the dangers surrounding a zinc-smelting plant in Spelter and should now pay a high price for its wanton, willful and reckless conduct, attorney Robert Kennedy Jr. argued Thursday as a class-action medical monitoring lawsuit went to the jury. … Kennedy said DuPont “had the state wired” with close contacts with people including DEP Secretary – and former DuPont attorney – Stephanie Timmermeyer. “This agency was a hand puppet for this company,” he charged.(Associated Press, October 2007, “DuPont Lawsuit Winds Down”)

DuPont wasn’t Timmermeyer’s only corporate master, however; she also showed a friendly face to the coal industry:

Coal companies are getting new strip mining permits faster and will continue to see the regulatory process streamlined under the Manchin administration, Environmental Protection Secretary Stephanie Timmermeyer told industry officials Friday. … Chris Hamilton, vice president of the Coal Association, said the association has been much happier with the agency since Timmermeyer fired Matthew B. Crum as its mining director in August 2003. Crum had led an effort to crack down on blackwater spills at Massey Energy operations, and pushed for tougher permit rules to limit mining’s contribution to flooding. Timmermeyer has refused to explain why she removed Crum. (Charleston Gazette, February 2005, “Timmermeyer touts faster mine permitting”)

Years later, multiple sources told the New York Times that Eustace Frederick, a powerful state legislator with coal industry ties, said to Timmermeyer point-blank that her nomination to the DEP’s top job would be confirmed only if she agreed to fire Crum.

III. Back Through the Revolving Door

Midway through her stint as a public official, Timmermeyer requested an exemption from a state law that would have prevented her from taking a job at a company regulated by Environmental Protection for six months after leaving office. Her request was granted, and after resigning from the DEP in 2008 she was listed as a registered lobbyist in West Virginia that same year.

In 2009, Ken Ward – the Charleston Gazette environmental reporter who had consistently raised questions about Timmermeyer’s DEP leadership – reported that ”some coal industry folks were putting Timmermeyer’s name forward” as a pro-industry candidate for a federal Department of the Interior directorship, in the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement (OSMRE). She was not selected for that job, though the candidate who was, Joe Pizarchik, was known to share her industry-friendly slant on environmental regulation. Instead, Timmermeyer joined natural gas giants Chesapeake Energy in 2011, though she appears to have been acting as legal counsel for its subsidiary Chesapeake Appalachia as early as November 2010.

While her work with Chesapeake takes her as far afield as the company’s shale drilling sites in Pennsylvania and now its lobbying base in Albany,  Timmermeyer’s West Virginia connections are still valuable in her current job, as evidenced by a May 2011 item in the Morgantown (W. Va.) Dominion Post, “Gas Drilling OK’d Near City”:

The state Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) has approved permits for two Marcellus gas wells in the Morgantown Industrial Park. Site preparation has begun, said Michael John, president of Northeast Natural Energy, the Charleston-based company that will do the drilling. Some officials and watershed advocates are concerned that the site sits upstream from Morgantown Utility Board’s drinking water treatment plant intake. … [Utility board general manager Tim] Ball formed a technical advisory group to deal with any potential threat to MUB’s watershed. Group members are Ball; Downstream Strategies President Evan Hansen; Dr. Paul Ziemkiewicz, director of the WVU’s Water Research Institute; and Stephanie Timmermeyer, a former DEP secretary and now director of regulatory affairs, Eastern Division, Chesapeake Energy.

Despite her current work as a lobbyist for a major fracker in the Marcellus Shale, her credentials as a former Secretary of the DEP apparently qualify her to protect the public drinking supply from fracking-related contamination. It is easy to see why these kinds of credentials are valuable to Chesapeake.

Timmermeyer’s most recent press mention came last November, when she announced that Chesapeake would spend $25,000 to seal off a residential water well contaminated by a blowout at one of the company’s many Pennsylvania natural gas wells - not because Chesapeake was responsible for the contamination, but simply “to be a good neighbor”:

Timmermeyer stated, “It was pretty clear that this water quality was always at this state and it was just something that we offered to do and agreed to take care of.” … Chesapeake highlighted Timmermeyer’s “public service” as a former Cabinet Secretary in West Virginia.

Chesapeake’s (and the fracking industry’s) revolving door operations go far beyond Timmermeyer, but her career offers a telling look at the dynamics of regulatory capture and just how much damage the revolving door can do to the public interest. Her story, and those of other lobbyists who have successfully disguised their industry allegiances during terms as “public servants,” is especially relevant to New York State and Ohio, states where the natural gas industry has not (yet) established itself as the dominant political force it has in Pennsylvania.

Joseph Martens, the head of New York’s Department of Environmental Conservation, named further examination of fracking as one of his office’s priorities for 2012, writing that it presents a “challenge and workload” but may offer “economic benefits … and energy independence.” These are claims that can be properly evaluated only if the influence of natural gas producers is kept to an absolute minimum. Martens and his counterparts in other states – a group that once included Stephanie Timmermeyer – must be monitored vigilantly by the public or their sworn duties will be subjugated to the financial interests of companies like Chesapeake. LittleSis provides a framework for this type of citizen activism; we’ll need all the researchers we can get to have an impact, so join us.

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).

George Sard, Chesapeake's new PR man, is pictured at left, behind former client Dick Fuld, CEO of Lehman Brothers, at a Congressional hearing shortly after the company's collapse.

The first reports of Sard’s hiring came today, amid news that Chesapeake’s board had decided to replace CEO Aubrey McClendon as chairman (he will continue as CEO). The company made the move following two weeks of controversy first sparked by a Reuters report that the CEO had borrowed $1.1 billion in secret, personal loans in order to finance his investments in the companies’ wells.

The reports raised serious conflict of interest questions and attracted new scrutiny from Chesapeake shareholders, the SEC, and the IRS. The company’s board has taken a series of steps to address the controversy, including ending the “Founders Well Participation Program” that gave McClendon stakes in Chesapeake wells. Its biggest shareholder, reclusive value investor O Mason Hawkins applauded today’s move. But Sard’s hiring suggests that the board doesn’t think the problems plaguing the company will go away any time soon.

Will Chesapeake emerge from the crisis in one piece, or will it go the way of Lehman or Enron? There appear to be fundamental problems with Chesapeake’s business model that go beyond CEO shenanigans; a recent Rolling Stone article suggested that the company is something of a Ponzi scheme. In which case, it might make sense to hire a top-notch PR team…

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.

This advanced search tool can be used to search for secondary or tertiary connections between people and/or organizations.

The link to the ALEC network search query is here, but note that it is only accessible to logged-in, advanced users. Drop us a note if you’d like to give it a test drive.

The ALEC network search query turns up some interesting names. They are hardly uniformly Republican  – several, such as Kenneth Frazier and Suzanne Nora Johnson, are Democratic donors. Two others, Pamela Carter and Gerard Baliles, have been elected to state office as Democrats. One, Carrie Walton Penner, hails from a family/company that has recently become embroiled in a massive foreign bribery scandal.

If anti-ALEC organizers were to start targeting the board members of ALEC companies, a la OccupyTheBoardroom.org, perhaps they would start with this list. (Please note that a growing number of corporations and member organizations have recently announced that they have severed ties with ALEC, and others may soon follow, including some listed below.)

Here is a full rundown of the list and their notable connections/background – 2011 ALEC sponsors are in bold:

• Kenneth Frazier – president, CEO and chairman of Merck; board member of Exxon Mobil and PhRMA; trustee of Penn State University.

• Suzanne Nora Johnson – former vice-chair of Goldman Sachs; board member of Pfizer, Intuit, and VISA, as well as insurance giant AIG, think-tank Brookings Institution, and the American Red Cross.

• John F. Turner – former assistant Secretary of State under George H.W. Bush and past president of major environmental nonprofit The Conservation Fund; board member of International Paper, Peabody Energy, and American Electric Power, as well as chemical manufacturer Ashland, Inc.

• Gerald Baliles – former governor of Virginia; board member of Altria and Norfolk Southern.

• David Bronczek – president and CEO of FedEx’s “Express” division; board member of International Paper; member of the National Infrastructure Advisory Council, a Homeland Security task group.

• Pamela Carter – former attorney general of Indiana; currently division president of Cummins, Inc. and board member of CSX and Spectra Energy.

• Karen Horn – financial industry executive currently on the boards of Eli Lilly and Norfolk Southern as well as Simon Property Group and the National Bureau of Economic Research; many other past executive positions and directorships.

• Holly Koeppel – senior vice president and CFO of American Electric Power; board member of Reynolds American.

• Charles Krulak – former Commandant of the Marine Corps and member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; current board member of Freeport-McMoRan and Union Pacific.

• Ann Livermore – board member and former senior executive of Hewlett-Packard; also on the board of UPS.

• Jon C. Madonna – former chairman and CEO of KPMG; current board member of AT&T and Freeport-McMoRan as well as Tidewater, Inc.

• James R. Moffett – chairman, president and CEO of both Freeport-McMoRan and its subsidiary McMoRan Exploration.

• Lionel L. Nowell III – former senior executive of PepsiCo; board member of American Electric Power and Reynolds American.

• Carrie Walton Penner – granddaughter of Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton and trustee of the Walton Family Foundation; on the board of the American Federation for Children and several education nonprofits, especially those supporting charter schools (California Charter Schools Association, Alliance for School Choice, KIPP Foundation).

• J. Stapleton Roy – former US ambassador to Singapore, China, and Indonesia; board member of ConocoPhillips and Freeport-McMoRan.

• J. Steven Whisler – former chairman and CEO of Phelps Dodge until its acquisition by Freeport-McMoRan; currently on the boards of International Paper and BNSF Railways.

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.

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)

That’s from testimony Summers gave during the Andrei Shleifer case. In Mr. Summers’ Washington, conflicts of interest were normal, accepted – a sign of expertise, even. There were no ethical problems with following the lead of banks you were regulating, or taking policy recommendations from speculators. And if there were conflicts of interest that posed moral problems – well, that’s for the lawyers to parse.

This apparent lack of an ethical compass eventually led to Summers’ downfall at Harvard, where he lost the presidency in large part due to his role in protecting Shleifer, his protege. Shleifer had been involved in a scheme to defraud the US and Russian governments. The groundbreaking Institutional Investor article by David McClintick on the scandal is here. In the words of Aaron Swartz, as a USAID-funded adviser to Russia during the 1990s, Shleifer “privatized Russia right into his pocket” – he, his wife, and his associates invested in newly-privatized Russian companies that they were helping to create and manage. Tennis, no-show jobs, navel-gazing documentaries and other hilarity ensued under Shleifer’s watch. The abuses eventually came to light, ending Shleifer’s project and giving way to years of litigation.

McClintick writes that as Shleifer’s longtime colleague/mentor, “Summers was positioned uniquely to influence Shleifer’s career path, to shape U.S. aid to Russia and Shleifer’s role in it and even to shield Shleifer after the scandal broke.” Summers, then Treasury Secretary, was in contact with him throughout, and when he became president of Harvard he helped protect Shleifer from punishment.

As mathbabe notes, Summers demonstrated an extremely foggy understanding of conflicts of interest during his testimony. His quotes would be hilarious if they did not carry such terrible implications for the US and global economy. Another quote from the II article:

Summers said conflict-of-interest “issues,” in his Washington experience, were “left to the lawyers.” He said he was sensitive to “ethics rules,” but testified that “in Washington I wasn’t ever smart enough to predict them . . . things that seemed very ethical to me were thought of as problematic and things that seemed quite problematic to me were thought of as perfectly fine. . . .”

Summers apparently did not take Shleifer’s ethical transgressions very seriously, pressuring Harvard administrators to go easy on him, commiserating with Shleifer and his wife about how Jeffrey Sachs (notably, another leading candidate for World Bank president) and other Harvard leadership were out to get him, and remembering what bathing suit he wore the day he discussed Russia with Shleifer on a Cape Cod beach, but forgetting most details of that conversation:

Q. Have you told us now everything you can recall about the conversation that you had with Andrei Shleifer?
A. I could probably expand on the bathing suits and so forth, but I suspect that I have probably told you everything that I recall that seems to me to be proximally germane to this matter.

Notably, Summers continued to consult with Shleifer’s wife, Nancy Zimmerman during his time at the Obama White House.

Summers’ bid for World Bank president has inspired a great deal of opposition: a petition that has garnered tens of thousands of signatures, a website with sections devoted to Larry’s crimes, like “Math is Hard” and “Let Them Eat Waste,” and plenty of befuddled blogging.

We’ve written extensively about other aspects of Summers’ career here at LittleSis, as he offers irrefutable Evidence of an American Plutocracy, to borrow from the title of a piece we published last year following his departure from the White House. We’ve also charted his calendar of appointments in the White House, dug into his disastrous management of Harvard’s finances, and reported on his role in derivatives deregulation.

A little known fact from that piece: Ken Lay offered Summers a seat on the board of Enron in early 2001, but he turned it down because he had just become Harvard president. Had he accepted, Enron would have been another strike against Summers. Unfortunately, according to Summers’ Law – the law of elite immunity from accountability – his association with that epic corporate blow-up probably would have had little effect on his career.

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

smetz@entercom.com

Roderick Aycox is an Alpharetta, GA businessman who has so far contributed  a combined $200,000 to “Restore Our Future” through his Rod and Leslie Aycox Foundation and Select Management Resources, LLC. He is also the president of LoanMax, which operates hundreds of car title loan operations, under a variety of names, in over 20 states. In 2005, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that Aycox frequently appeared before various state legislatures and met with banking regulators, “encouraging them to interpret their rules to allow his business to operate profitably – that is, by charging triple-digit interest rates.” His political donations between 2000 and 2005 were found to exceed $300,000, spread among 10 states.

Consumer groups and local governments fought back – in 2009 LoanMax was forced to issue refunds and shutter its operations in Washington, D.C. after being sued by the city for charging over 300% APR on loans, ten times the legal maximum. But such setbacks were rare, and as Aycox’s network of title loan shops grew, so did his political influence. Under his own name as well as those of LoanMax and his other businesses, Aycox was identified as a major donor to officials and political action committees in Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Virginia and Wisconsin. The Washington Post found that the 2010 loosening of regulations on car-title lenders in Virginia was preceded by over $750,000 in donations by LoanMax to politicians in that state alone since 2004.

Another large donation to “Restore Our Future” was received on January 30 from the Provo, UT-based RTTTA, LLC. As the Times’ Confessore notes, RTTTA’s registered agent is J. Todd Rawle, a payday executive. Rawle is the member of a prominent Provo family that has operated payday lending businesses since the 1990s. Richard Rawle and sons Tracy and Todd are listed in varying roles as the executives of CCO Financial, Leadgenix, Scrap Gold Brokers, and Softwise, but their flagship is Check City, which has expanded from 17 businesses in four states in 2002 to 80 in 2010, and currently operates in 17 states.

Like Rod Aycox, the Rawles have long known that targeted political contributions were needed to protect their predatory business model from government oversight. In 2006 the Deseret News featured Richard Rawle and his family in a story on Utah’s largest donors, documenting over $150,000 in political giving and noting that “[t]hey have annually successfully fought bills seeking more regulation of the payday loan industry.” When John Swallow, the candidate they backed for a Congressional seat in 2002 and 2004, was defeated for a second time, the Rawles retained him as a lobbyist and legal counsel until in 2009 he was named a deputy attorney general, a position which the Salt Lake Tribune noted would require him to “provide legal advice to the Utah Division of Finance, which oversees payday lending.” (Ever the opportunist, Richard Rawle became a generous supporter of Swallow’s Democratic opponent, Rep. Jim Matheson, immediately after the second defeat; in 2010 he bragged to the Tribune of his access to the Congressman, while disingenuously suggesting Matheson had no role in overseeing the payday loan industry despite his seat on the House Energy and Commerce Committee.)

Today Richard Rawle sits on the board of the Community Financial Services Association of America (CFSA), a national group that lobbies for the payday loan industry and has been derided for spreading misinformation about the negative impact its member organizations have on their customers. Between this position and his financial ties to three of Utah’s four members of Congress (Matheson, Rep. Jason Chaffetz and Sen. Mike Lee), Rawle looks well-placed to continue profiting from Americans in financial distress with limited governmental restrictions. He, Roderick Aycox and others like them clearly agree with Forbes’ assertion that political influence is “the most undervalued asset in America,” and now that the rise of the Super PAC has allowed their millions to speak louder than ever before, it’s crucial that their ties to government be investigated and publicized – especially when the industry that stands to benefit is as destructive as predatory lending.

If you are interested in joining us in investigating Super PACs, please consider signing up for the Super PAC Sleuth LittleSis research group.

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.

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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.