Until a few weeks ago, Joel Leftwich was a senior lobbyist for the largest food and beverage company in the United States. During his tenure at PepsiCo—maker of Cheetos, Lay’s potato chips and, of course, Pepsi-Cola—the company had played a leading role in efforts to beat back local soda taxes and ensure that junk food remained available in schools. But PepsiCo also faced new challenges at the federal level. The Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, championed by Michelle Obama, had placed new nutrition standards on school lunches. PepsiCo sent teams of lobbyists to Capitol Hill, deluged political candidates with donations, and fired off letters to regulators asking them to weaken the new rules. One such PepsiCo letter requested the redefinition of a “school day” so the company could continue to sell its sugary sports drinks at “early morning sports practices.” Leftwich, a former congressional liaison for the Department of Agriculture, was well positioned to help PepsiCo shore up its allies in the House and Senate.

Last April, Leftwich paid a visit to one such friend, Democratic Senator Debbie Stabenow of Michigan, then chairwoman of the Senate Agriculture Committee, to thank her for opposing nutrition guidelines for food stamp purchases.

Now Leftwich will have far more access to such friends. As the newly appointed staff director of the Senate Agriculture Committee, now under GOP control, Leftwich will have wide sway over the law that funds school lunches, which is up for reauthorization this year. PepsiCo can rest easier, confident that the guidelines already in place are unlikely to be strengthened—and may be weakened instead. Leftwich’s new boss, Republican Senator Pat Roberts of Kansas, who took over the Agriculture Committee gavel in January, has set his sights on dialing back school lunch nutrition requirements, which he has called “Big Brother government that’s out of control.”

While all eyes were on the changing of the guard in Congress as Republicans seized control of the US Senate in January, there was an equally profound change taking place among Capitol Hill staff, as many GOP lawmakers handed over the keys to corporate lobbyists like Leftwich.

“We’ve seen a dramatic uptick in K Street moving into congressional staff positions since the Citizens United decision,” says Craig Holman, Public Citizen’s expert on lobbying and ethics. House Speaker John Boehner, he notes, has “encouraged new members to employ lobbyists on their personal and committee staff.”

On almost any big issue coming up for debate during the final two years of the Obama administration—surveillance, trade, healthcare, entitlements, tax reform, climate change—corporate lobbyists will now be attempting to influence their own former colleagues, whose salaries are now covered by US taxpayers.

The new staff director of the House Intelligence Committee, Jeff Shockey, comes to the Hill after working as a lobbyist for many of the country’s leading intelligence-agency contractors, including General Dynamics, Boeing and, just last year, Academi, the firm formerly known as Blackwater. The House Oversight Committee, a key investigative body, will now have a staff director named Sean McLaughlin, a former corporate lobbyist who spent the past three years as a principal at the Podesta Group. Tom Chapman, who earned compensation worth $1,531,453 in 2014 as vice president of government affairs for US Airways, will now earn considerably less as part of the counsel staff for the Senate Aviation Subcommittee, which oversees his former employer. And as Congress takes up tax reform, one of the latest hires to the Joint Committee on Taxation is Ben Gross, who spent more than a decade as international tax director for PricewaterhouseCoopers, a firm that specializes in helping corporations avoid American taxes.

* * *

Lobbyists have been hired to help the offices of the most controversial addition to the GOP leadership team, Louisiana Representative Steve Scalise, now House majority whip. Scalise came under fire in December following the revelation that as a state lawmaker, over a decade ago, he had addressed a white supremacist organization founded by former Klansman David Duke. But Scalise’s return to Capitol Hill in January was hardly dampened by the scandal. In a party at the posh Capitol Hill Club, a private meeting ground for Republicans that has been sued by its employees for alleged racial discrimination, nearly 300 lobbyists cheered the embattled lawmaker as he laid out his agenda for the coming session, according to Politico. Scalise was flanked by one of his newest staffers, Bill Hughes, formerly a lobbyist for the Retail Industry Leaders Association, a powerful trade group that has pressured lawmakers to drop efforts to raise the minimum wage.

And why not celebrate? Scalise is beloved by Washington’s army of influence-peddlers for his loyalty to the Beltway’s lobbyist elite. In his previous position as chair of the Republican Study Committee, Scalise welcomed the “K Street community” at special business-outreach events attended by representatives of such major firms as Halliburton, MasterCard, General Dynamics and Northrop Grumman. The news that Scalise would move up the leadership ladder was celebrated by Koch Industries lobbyists, who threw a tony wine-tasting party featuring “pinots from Oregon and the central coast of California.” Soon after ascending to his new post, Scalise shocked many by having a registered lobbyist, John Feehery, sit in as applicants interviewed for jobs.

It is not just veteran politicians who are leaning on lobbyists. Newly elected Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa, who delivered the GOP’s response to Obama’s State of the Union address, tapped Lisa Goeas, a senior official with the National Federation of Independent Business, as her chief of staff. Democrats, too—to a lesser degree—have been recruiting on K Street. Take West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, a Democrat who is expected to join a largely Republican effort to curtail new Environmental Protection Agency regulations on carbon emissions from coal-fired power plants. He just hired a new senior policy adviser for energy, John O’Donnell, who arrived at the job from working as a top lobbyist for Xcel Energy, a large utility company with thirteen coal power plants. On Xcel’s behalf, O’Donnell had lobbied to weaken EPA regulations in the last Congress.

Some K Street firms have sent multiple lobbyists through the revolving door. The new deputy staff director of the Senate Energy Committee, Colin Hayes, is a former vice president of McBee Strategic Consulting—as is Angela Becker-Dippman, just hired as staff director for committee Democrats. Becker-Dippman once represented such firms as Tesla Motors, while Hayes had lobbied for the National Mining Association and Duke Energy.

It’s hard to overestimate the influence these former lobbyists could have over lawmaking during Obama’s final years in office. Congressional staffers enjoy an outsize amount of power on Capitol Hill, doing the actual work of meeting with interest groups, helping to schedule hearings, writing lawmaker remarks—and writing legislation. Yet they often escape public scrutiny.

I visited Washington, DC, on the first day of the new business-friendly Congress to watch the wave of GOP freshmen arrive. That night, I stopped by one of the biggest welcome receptions in town, a party hosted by the Republican Jewish Coalition at a Capital Grille steak house. I wasn’t allowed in, of course, not being a donor to the RJC or to any GOP candidates. But the event played host to dozens of new and returning lawmakers, along with a swarm of lobbyists and campaign contributors.

Outside the event, I approached Mark Isakowitz, one of the highest-grossing lobbyists on K Street, whom the Hill, an online news site, named a top lobbyist of 2014. As a principal at a prominent Republican government relations firm, Isakowitz has lobbied for sixteen years on a range of tax and financial issues for some of the largest companies in America. One specialty has been weakening the financial reforms passed after the 2008 economic collapse. He, too, was just tapped to serve on Capitol Hill—in his case, as chief of staff to Republican Senator Rob Portman of Ohio.

Though it received little attention, the very first bill passed by the new Congress and signed into law was a measure to reauthorize something called Terrorism Risk Insurance. Tucked away in that bill was a special amendment to weaken the oversight of derivative trades. Thanks to the amendment, commodity regulators are prohibited from forcing large corporations—typically oil, manufacturing and agribusinesses broadly defined as “end users”—to post collateral and margin requirements for their trades. Marcus Stanley, the policy director of Americans for Financial Reform, a group that favors strong regulations on Wall Street, says the amendment is dangerous because “losses can occur in transactions with commercial end users just as they can in any other transaction.”

The special exemption was promoted by a coalition of end users, including Honeywell, Boeing, General Electric and Koch Industries, four companies whose political action committees rank among the largest in the country. Koch, known for its oil refineries, also boasts one of the biggest derivative trading businesses in the world.

Isakowitz, according to disclosure reports, lobbied on a bill in the last Congress, S. 2102, that featured language nearly identical to that in the amendment that passed, with little debate, as part of the Terrorism Risk Insurance bill. His new boss, Senator Portman, voted to keep the derivatives amendment intact.

I tried to ask Isakowitz if any conflicts of interests would be posed by his two decades as a corporate lobbyist now that he had become a public servant. Isakowitz declined to answer, wished me a curt “Good night” and walked away.

Lisa Gilbert, director of Public Citizen’s Congress Watch division, says the derivatives amendment is just one sign of how lawmaking has been captured by industry. There was no discussion of derivatives deregulation during the hotly contested midterms, nor did any candidate publicly address the issue. It was a demand made not by constituents, but by lobbyists. “The staff,” Gilbert says, “is reflective of what Congress has already begun to prioritize.”

This post was originally published at RepublicReport.org

Lima, Peru—Climate-science deniers have routinely appeared at international summits to address global warming, hoping to bog down the process with a litany of arguments and colorful publicity stunts. They’ve charged, for instance, that there is a global conspiracy of UN scientists working to “manufacture a global-warming crisis.” At recent events, echoing the coal giant Peabody’s new campaign, the same cadre of deniers have claimed that any reductions in CO₂ emissions will limit the development of African nations.

Now here’s a relatively new line of criticism: delegates from poor nations are showing up to the international climate accords just so they collect a pier diem and take a vacation with their families.

Myron Ebell, a leading spokesperson for climate-change deniers, made such an argument this week in Lima, where the United Nations is meeting for interim climate negotiations. Speaking to Republic Report, Ebell argued that he believes delegates from Third World countries appear at events such as these largely to collect a cash payment and to give their wives an opportunity to shop in glamorous cities. Previous conferences have taken place in Copenhagen, Cancún and other desirable locations, Ebell noted.

In a follow-up interview, Ebell, of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a libertarian think tank funded by fossil-fuel companies (Republic Report exclusively reported on some of CEI’s undisclosed corporate donors using a list we obtained), expanded on his argument.

“It’s very desirable for them to go to international conferences in nice locales, and bring their wives and, you know, have extra payments,” Ebell said. “The United Nations pays these delegates from poor countries to attend and so it’s very attractive to keep it going.”

Craig Rucker, another prominent climate-science denier at the UN conference in Lima this week, told Republic Report that he had heard similar stories of why poor countries attend climate summits. “They may be interested nominally in the issue, but if they get the opportunity and their government gives them that, they can bring their wife and enjoy this and learn something,” he said after a press conference hosted by his organization, Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT).

“What they conveyed to me is, it’s Lima, and if you’re from an African country, the weather’s nice, it’s exotic, and you get to go to Bali, Indonesia,” said Rucker. “There’s a lot of opportunity to see parts of the world they would not normally get to see.” Rucker added that he would “never make the argument” that the “majority” of delegates from poor countries attend for mainly for tourism purposes, “but have I met some who have said that? Yeah, I’ve met some from delegations who have candidly told me that.”

Reached for a response, groups working closely with poor nations during the negotiations were outraged.

“These countries have suffered. For them to come and help the world craft an effective plan, and for them to be accused by fossil fuel lobbyists, it’s the worst thing I’ve heard anywhere in this process,” said Mohamed Adow, a senior climate-change adviser with Christian Aid.

Ebell is not a registered lobbyist, but told us that he does confer regularly with lobbyists from fossil-fuel companies and other firms that support his point of view. His organization, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, has received financial backing from coal firms such as Murray Energy and indicted executive Don Blankenship’s former firm, Massey Energy, as well as personal funds from David H. Koch, the billionaire of oil, gas and commodity speculating giant Koch Industries.

CEI’s most recent tax disclosure form shows that the think tank paid Ebell $111,014 in 2012. It’s not known what he might earn from other sources.

Adow, who is from Kenya and currently based in the United Kingdom, explained that countries in east Africa have “seen the increasing frequency of drought, reduction in crop productivity, [and] that is having a huge impact on people’s lives and people’s livelihoods.” Adow rejects Ebell’s view that negotiators from poor countries are using the summit as a vacation opportunity, calling the argument “ridiculous.”

“The negotiators who are here are accountable to people who have been affected by climate change, and as the people’s representatives, for them to be accused by fossil-fuel lobbyists who only want to continue benefiting off of the back of people who are poor are ridiculous,” Adow said.

This post was originally published at RepublicReport.org

LaserLock Technologies, a firm that sells anti-counterfeiting products, won a powerful congressional ally on Capitol Hill after recruiting a Kentucky congressman’s wife.

Representative Ed Whitfield, a senior Republican lawmaker from western Kentucky, personally submitted company documents on behalf of LaserLock to the congressional record in support of legislation crucial to the firm’s business. Whitfield’s wife, Constance Harriman, a registered lobbyist, has come under scrutiny from Office of Congressional Ethics investigators for unduly influencing Whitfield and his staff for her client, the Humane Society. But new revelations about her role with LaserLock, a company in which she is an investor and where she serves as a board member, reveal that Representative Whitfield may have used his congressional office to boost the fortunes of his wife’s company.

Whitfield’s effort to assist LaserLock is captured on video. A tape of a subcommittee hearing on the morning of April 25, 2013, shows the congressman intervening to endorse LaserLock-backed legislation to create a national standard for tracking the distribution of pharmaceuticals.

Five months prior to Whitfield’s advocacy on behalf of the firm, in November of 2012, LaserLock appointed Constance Harriman, Whitfield’s wife, to its board of directors.

The April 25 tape shows that as the Energy and Commerce Committee began discussing HR 1919, the Safeguarding America’s Pharmaceuticals Act, Whitfield told colleagues that his interest was sparked by the threat of organized crime.

“Last week, I attended a forum over at Georgetown University,” said Whitfield. “I really was taken aback by the amount of money being made by organized crime and other groups and entering into our supply chain counterfeit prescription drugs.”

Whitfield then moved to submit a “statement from a company called LaserLock.” The statement, from LaserLock Chief Executive Neal Alpert, enthusiastically endorsed a digital tracking system for drug products to combat fraud. LaserLock sells SecureLight+, a labeling product the firm has pitched as a solution for pharmaceutical firms seeking to thwart counterfeiters.

Whitfield’s move to intervene on behalf of the company was a considerable endorsement. Whitfield is a senior member of the Energy and Commerce Committee, which oversaw the markup of the counterfeiting legislation.

The congressman did not disclose his family’s investments in the company or his wife’s position as a board member during the hearing. Whitfield also did not disclose that the Georgetown University forum he referenced during his remarks was sponsored by LaserLock. Pictures from the event show Whitfield chatting with LaserLock executives and advisers, including Alpert and a company advisor named Brad Blakeman, a well-known DC lobbyist.

The counterfeiting legislation requires the Food and Drug Administration to implement a system for manufacturers, pharmacies and other distributors along America’s pharmaceutical supply chain to establish tracing and identification standards to track drug products.

LaserLock heaped praise upon the tracking system outlined by the legislation. “LaserLock is uniquely positioned to play a leadership role in designing such a system,” said Michael Sonnenreich, chairman of LaserLock’s board, in a prepared statement. “In passing this legislation, the House of Representatives has taken a strong first step in addressing the dangers that counterfeit pharmaceuticals pose to our nation,” Alpert said in a celebratory press release.

The bill backed by LaserLock later passed the committee and sailed through the House of Representatives on a voice vote, meaning a roll call of votes was not taken. The legislation merged with a Senate version of the bill and was signed into law by President Obama last year.

Upon her appointment to LaserLock’s board in 2012, Harriman was granted stock options valued at approximately $89,568, according to statements filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. She was also granted the option to purchase 1 million shares of the company’s common stock at a discount price of $0.05, along with an additional 1 million shares at the same price that would vest upon completion of two years of service on the board. The Whitfield household continued to hold a significant stake in the company as the congressman submitted testimony on behalf of LaserLock’s CEO. Whitfield’s personal-finance statement shows the couple owned up to $100,000 worth of stock in LaserLock through 2013.

Though the firm may not be well known, LaserLock’s roster of advisers and board members reads like a who’s who of Beltway politicos. Former Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele serves as an advisor to the firm, and previous board members include former World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz and former Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff. LaserLock’s Alpert also has a history of notoriety. In 2007, Alpert was ordered by the District of Columbia to “repay nearly $70,000 in unauthorized expenses and unaccounted money from a pair of local baseball groups he had chaired,” according to a story in Politics Daily. He was accused of using the baseball charity’s money on to pay for food, drinks and charges at DC nightclubs. In 2011, The New York Times reported that Alpert was a member of a group of political consultants who attempted to land a $10 million contract with Muammar el-Qaddafi to help the Libyan strongman maintain power.

Earlier this month, the Office of Congressional Ethics completed its investigation of Whitfield and his wife over a complaint related to Harriman’s work as a Humane Society lobbyist. As part of that probe, OCE investigators interviewed Whitfield’s staff and discovered that Harriman routinely used her access to Whitfield’s office to gather information on congressional action. Whitfield’s chief of staff, for example, confirmed to OCE investigators that Harriman had “reached out to you and requested that Representative Whitfield sign on as a co-sponsor or vote a certain way or take any other form of an official act where ultimately that course of action was not taken.” Though OCE did not move to censure Whitfield, the report revealed Harriman used Whitfield’s staff to assist in scheduling “as many as 100 meetings with other congressional offices,” and contacted her husband’s congressional staff about “legislation she lobbied on numerous occasions.”

The investigation narrowly focused on Harriman’s work on behalf of the Humane Society, and did not involve her affiliation with LaserLock. The investigation also did not involve a separate ethics issue, reported in July by the Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting’s R.G. Dunlop, involving an investment property owned jointly by Harriman, Whitfield and a prominent lobbyist named Juanita Duggan.

The probe, however, inadvertently exposed e-mails showing further evidence of LaserLock’s influence through the Whitfield household. As part of the probe, the Ethics Committee released pages of e-mails between Harriman and Whitfield’s staff. The e-mails show that in addition to e-mailing Whitfield’s staff about Humane Society issues, Harriman used Whitfield’s staff to gather information on legislative developments on behalf of LaserLock.

On April 13 of 2013, LaserLock’s Alpert e-mailed Harriman to ask about a customs bill sponsored by Representative Kevin Brady. Harriman, forwarding Alpert’s e-mail, queried Whitfield’s chief of staff Cory Hicks about the legislation. “Do you think Ed will be supporting this bill?” she asked.

Hicks responded on April 15, “That was a bill that was introduced last Congress. I don’t know much about it and to my knowledge it hasn’t been reintroduced. Should he be prepared to talk about this bill tomorrow night?”

The next day, Whitfield appeared at a LaserLock promotional event at Georgetown University.

Harriman and Whitfield’s office did not respond to a request for comment from Republic Report.

Jessica Levinson, a Loyola Law School professor who focuses on ethics issues, told Republic Report, “I believe that the congressman should have disclosed his wife’s interest in the company prior to appearing at a hearing concerning that company. The public has an interest in knowing why their elected officials take certain positions. Most often disclosure and transparency laws focus on the need to report financial information. This case shows us why.”

The video of Whitfield submitting LaserLock documents is below:

This post was originally published at RepublicReport.org

There’s a powerful solution for disclosing the secret-money sloshing around in our political system. It does not require an act of Congress or action from any of the effectively toothless campaign-finance watchdogs, like the Federal Election Commission. In fact, this solution could be passed in an instant, and the only requirement for action is political will.

President Barack Obama can issue an executive order today that requires government contractors to disclose their dark-money campaign contributions.

Why doesn’t he? And why don’t campaign-finance-reform organizations push for such a fix?

In 2011, following the first wave of undisclosed campaign money in the 2010 midterms, the administration floated such an executive order. The idea provoked furious lobbying from business groups concerned that their donors would have to take responsibility for their electioneering.

The US Chamber of Commerce, the largest dark-money group in the last two midterm elections, not so subtly threatened war with the White House over the order. “We will fight it through all available means,” one Chamber lobbyist told The New York Times, referencing the bombing campaign against Muammar el-Qaddafi, “To quote what they say every day on Libya, all options are on the table.”

The order wouldn’t impact every dark-money donor. Individuals and companies without contracts with the federal government would remain untouched.

However, the order would likely impact dozens of firms. General Dynamics, one of the largest defense contractors in the country, has told shareholders that it has directly funded political dark-money groups, though it has declined to name them. As journalist Paul Blumenthal has pointed out, “JPMorgan Chase, Exxon Mobil, General Electric, and the aforementioned Koch Industries all hold government contracts.”

As Republicans prepare to focus narrowly on repealing the medical-device tax in the next Congress, a measure that would increase the deficit by nearly $30 billion over ten years, doesn’t the public have a right to know the full extent of medical-device manufacturers’ campaign donations? There’s evidence medical-device companies funded some of the largest dark-money campaign organs, but we do not have a full picture. Given that major medical-device firms hold federal contracts, an executive order could help reporters and members of the public understand what’s really motivating our policymakers.

Republicans on Capitol Hill have cried foul on the disclosure idea, claiming that the executive order would exempt unions. But that’s simply not true: several unions have contracts with the federal government and would be included in the rule with other federal contractors. Moreover, many unions already disclose dark-money payments through reports filed with the Department of Labor. The union argument is really a red herring, because the rule would not impact dozens of corporate and individual dark-money donors.

When the idea was originally floated in 2011, congressional Republicans temporarily blocked any further consideration of the executive order with riders attached to the appropriations bills. “These riders have since expired,” says Public Citizen’s Craig Holman, “and with the pending Republican majority in both chambers of Congress, a significant amount of the president’s agenda will have to be achieved through executive action. Opening up the books on dark money is one such action.”

Holman, Public Citizen’s lobbying expert, e-mailed Republic Report to say that his organization “is renewing its call to the Obama administration to issue an executive order requiring disclosure of political spending by government contractors.”

After initially floating the possibility of issuing the executive order, the administration backed down. The question is, Will the failure to act on dark money be part of Obama’s legacy?

This post was originally published at RepublicReport.org

In the midterm elections, Republicans appear to have won their largest House majority since the Hoover administration. Republicans won on the weakness of Democratic candidates, a poor resource-allocation strategy by Democratic party leaders—particularly Steve Israel, chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee—and an election narrative that did little to inspire base Democratic voters. That being said, in many ways, the game was rigged from the start. The GOP benefitted from the most egregious gerrymandering in American history.

As Rolling Stone reported, GOP donors plowed cash into state legislative efforts in 2010 for the very purpose of redrawing congressional lines. In the following year, as the Tea Party wave brought hundreds of Republicans into office, newly empowered Republican governors and state legislatures carved congressional districts for maximum partisan advantage. Democrats attempted this too, but only in two states: Maryland and Illinois. For the GOP however, strictly partisan gerrymandering prevailed in Ohio, Pennsylvania Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Texas, Louisiana, Arizona, Tennessee and beyond.

Here’s an example from the election last night. In Pennsylvania, one state in which the GOP drew the congressional districts in a brazenly partisan way, Democratic candidates collected 44 percent of the vote, yet Democratic candidates won only five House seats out of eighteen. In other words, Democrats secured only 27 percent of Pennsylvania’s congressional seats despite winning nearly half of the votes. See the graph below:

As the results from this year roll in, we see a similar dynamic. Republican gerrymandering means Democratic voters are packed tightly into single districts, while Republicans are spread out in such a way to translate into the most congressional seats for the GOP.

There are a lot of structural issues that influence congressional elections, from voter-ID requirements to early-voting access. But what does it matter if you’ve been packed into a district in which your vote can’t change the composition of Congress?

Before the Ping May, a rusty cargo vessel, could disembark from the port of Santa Marta en route to the Netherlands in late August, Colombian inspectors boarded the boat and made a discovery. Hidden in the ship’s chain locker, amidst its load of coal bound for Europe, were approximately 40 kilograms, or about ninety pounds, of cocaine. A Colombian Coast Guard official told The Nation that there is an ongoing investigation.

The seizure of the narcotics shipment in the Caribbean port occurred far away from Kentucky, the state in which Senator Mitch McConnell is now facing a career-defining election. But the Republican Senate minority leader has the closest of ties to the owner of the Ping May, the vessel containing the illicit materials: the Foremost Maritime Corporation, a firm founded and owned by McConnell’s in-laws, the Chao family.

Though Foremost has played a pivotal role in McConnell’s life, bestowing the senator with most of his personal wealth and generating thousands in donations to his campaign committees, the drug bust went unnoticed in Kentucky, where every bit of McConnell-related news has generated fodder for the campaign trail. That’s because, like many international shipping companies, Chao’s firm is shrouded from public view, concealing its identity and limiting its legal liability through an array of tax shelters and foreign registrations. Registered through a limited liability company in the Marshall Islands, the Ping May flies the Liberian flag.

Mitch McConnell and his wife Elaine Chao with James Chao (image: ElaineLChao.com)

McConnell’s ties to the Chaos go back to the late 1980s, when James Chao began donating to the senator. In 1993, McConnell married James’s daughter, Elaine Chao, a Republican activist and former Reagan administration official who would later serve as secretary of labor in the George W. Bush cabinet. James Chao emigrated to the United States from Taiwan, and founded the Foremost Maritime Corporation upon settling in New York. The company has grown significantly over the years, from acting as maritime agent during the Vietnam War to controlling a fleet of approximately sixteen dry-bulk cargo ships in operation today.

Foremost acts as a shipping agent, purchasing vessels made primarily in China and coordinating shipment of commodities. Records reviewed by The Nation reveal that Foremost transports corn, chemicals and other goods to cities throughout the world. The company has offices in New York and Hong Kong.

Some of the goods shipped by Foremost echo themes of the McConnell campaign. At a Young Professionals Association of Louisville event this month, McConnell stressed his opposition to carbon dioxide limits imposed by the federal government that would impact the domestic coal market. He argued that such efforts would be fruitless given the role of coal in developing countries and the rising coal trade. Foremost ships routinely transport coal from ports in Australia and Colombia, countries with cheap coal, for export to Asia and Europe.

The firm, however, leaves a faint online trace. Foremost’s website FMCNY.com is blank. Records and court documents obtained by The Nation show that the ownership of the company’s vessels—with names such as Ping May, Soya May, Fu May and Grain May—is obscured through a byzantine structure of tax entities. Most of Foremost’s vessels are flagged in Liberia, which ensures that crew members of Foremost’s ships work under Liberia’s maritime labor laws, which critics note allow for intimidation in the workplace and few protections for labor unions. In addition, a Liberian “flag of convenience” allows ship owners to pay lower tonnage taxes than ships that fly the US flag. Maritime companies have increasingly used the Marshall Islands to register their vessels. The jurisdiction boasts of “no taxation, lax regulation, and no requirements for disclosure of many corporate details—even to the United States government,” according to a report in World Policy Journal.

The recent seizure of cocaine on a Foremost coal ship came as authorities in Colombia have stepped up anti-drug trafficking enforcement in the region. The Nation spoke to Luis Gonzales, an official with the Colombian Coast Guard in Santa Marta, who told us that the Ping May’s crew were questioned as part of an ongoing investigation, but that no charges have yet been filed. His team found the cocaine in forty separate packages.

Picture provided by the Colombian Navy after the cocaine seizure (image: armada.mil.co)

Contacted by telephone, a representative of Foremost said he is “obviously going to have no comment on this one.”

McConnell has benefitted in many ways from his relationship with his in-laws.

The Republican Senate minority leader’s personal wealth grew seven-fold over the last ten years thanks in large part to a gift given to him and his wife in 2008 from James Chao worth between $5 million and $25 million (Senate ethics forms require personal finance disclosures in ranges of amounts, rather than specific figures). The gift helped the McConnells after their stock portfolio dipped in the wake of the financial crisis that year, and ensured they could pay off more than $100,000 in mortgage debt on their Washington home.

The generous gift made McConnell one of the wealthiest members of the Senate, with a net worth averaging around $22.8 million, according to The Washington Post’s review of his financial disclosures.

Following the gift, McConnell sent a letter of congratulations to an auditorium of Chinese officials in Shanghai who were gathered for an event honoring James Chao’s wife (McConnell’s mother-in-law, Ruth Mulan Chu Chao, who passed away in 2007). The Shanghai Mulan Education Foundation, created in her honor, regularly hosts students from the University of Louisville, where McConnell has a leadership academy bearing his name that sends students on trips to China.

The ties between McConnell and his in-laws have come under scrutiny before. In 2001, they were probed in depth by The New Republic in an article that charged that McConnell led an effort to soften his party’s criticism of China. Through James Chao, who was a classmate of Jiang Zemin, the president of China in the ’90s, McConnell and his wife met with Jiang several times, both in Beijing and in Washington. McConnell subsequently tempered his criticism of Chinese human rights abuses, and broke with hawks like Senator Jesse Helms to support Most Favored Nation trading status with China. As Foremost established closer ties with mainland China, McConnell endorsed the position that the United States should remain “ambiguous” about coming to the defense of Taiwan. In 1999, McConnell and his wife appeared at the University of Louisville with Chinese Ambassador Li Zhaoxing. Li used the opportunity to bash congressional leaders for rebuking China over its repression of the Falun Gong religious sect. “Any responsible government will not foster evil propensities of cults by being over-lenient,” Li reportedly said at the event with McConnell and Chao. Rather than distance himself from the remarks, McConnell reportedly spoke about his “good working relationship” with Li.

Last Friday, McConnell dipped into his personal fortune to lend his own campaign $1.8 million for the final week before the election. Members of the Chao family and employees of Foremost have also given over $90,000 in contributions to McConnell over the years.

Requests for comment to the McConnell team about the Ping May cocaine incident have gone unanswered.

McConnell has positioned himself over the years as a tough on drugs politician. In 1996, McConnell was the sole sponsor of the Enhanced Marijuana Penalties Act, a bill to increase the mandatory minimum sentencing for those caught with certain amounts of marijuana. A press release noted that his bill would make “penalties for selling marijuana comparable to those for selling heroin and cocaine.”

In recent weeks, McConnell has touted his role in calling for more federal money to be used for drug enforcement.

This post was originally published at RepublicReport.org

It wasn’t long ago that coal executives were openly discussing their dream of Republicans seizing the White House and making Oklahoma Senator Jim Inhofe—who believes climate change is a “hoax” concocted by greedy scientists—the head of the EPA.

Now, they have a second chance. As dark-money groups and Super PACs backed by millions of dollars from the fossil-fuel industry are propelling Republicans to a Senate majority, climate science–denying politicians are likely to seize control of key committee chairmanships, a coup for companies seeking to pollute the atmosphere with impunity. What’s more, Inhofe is slated to become chair of the Environment and Public Works Committee, with oversight of the EPA.

Republic Report took a look at how the US Senate would likely change under GOP control:

— Environment and Public Works Committee: Senator Jim Inhofe (R-OK) is in line to take control of the EPQ chairmanship, which would give him authority over the EPA. Inhofe, who has compared climate-change activists to Nazis, has already signaled that he will go after regulators on a raft of issues concerning greenhouse gases, from methane leaks to the new rules over coal-fire power plants.

— Subcommittee on Science and Space: As current ranking member of this subcommittee, Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) has a good shot at becoming the chairman. This vital subcommittee oversees the National Science Foundation, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and issues relating to federally funded scientific research. Cruz is a proud denier of climate-change science. When he ran for office in 2012, Cruz told reporters in Texas that global warming ceased in 1997. Earlier this year, in an interview with CNN, Cruz again questioned the science, claiming the “data are not supporting what the advocates are arguing.”

— Homeland Security and Governmental Reform Committee: Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI), in line to take control of the Homeland Security Committee, would likely use his perch to continue to harass scientists. The committee is the Senate’s chief investigative and oversight body. Johnson has already distinguished himself with outbursts against Dr. James Hansen, using a hearing earlier this year as an opportunity to tell the award-winning NASA scientist that climate “science is far from settled.” Johnson, who claims that “sunspot activity” is responsible for any changes in climate, has also railed against groups pushing for reform, accusing one of “environmental jihad.”

— Budget Committee: Senator Mike Enzi (R-WY) has brushed aside the threat of climate change, calling the debate over the issue a “waste of money.” As the next possible chair of the Budget Committee, Enzi may have a chance to rewrite the budget and reduce funding for agencies attempting to regulate carbon pollution. There has been talk about Republicans shutting the government down in a bid to defund the EPA over its climate-change rules. Enzi has already criticized the EPA’s coal regulations and could move such a strategy forward.

Should Republicans take a majority of seats in the US Senate, the caucus would be led by Senators Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and John Cornyn (R-TX), two men who have refused to answer fairly simple questions about the threat of man-made climate change.

Moreover, the Senate Republicans have indicated that they will not only block the few and fairly weak proposals to deal with climate change but are just as interested in using their power to intimidate environmental nonprofits. Senator David Vitter (R-LA) has recently published reports listing the American Lung Association and the National Wildlife Foundation as part of a nefarious environmental cabal. Though the Vitter reports fail to show any wrongdoing by the nonprofits, he has already sent investigative letters to some groups.

Once viewed as a lock for Republicans, the race for the open US Senate seat in South Dakota is now very competitive as corruption allegations plaguing GOP candidate and former Governor Mike Rounds boost the prospects of his challengers, including Democrat Rick Weiland and independent candidates Larry Pressler and Gordon Howie. In particular, Rounds has been dogged by accusations that an EB-5 visa program heavily promoted by his administration violated the law as it provided American visas to wealthy Chinese investors.

Now records reveal that the same state agency that oversaw the controversial visa program also extended taxpayer assistance to companies in which Rounds and his campaign manager, Rob Skjonsberg, are investors. Governor Dennis Daugaard, Rounds’s successor and former running mate, appointed a number of Rounds allies along with Skjonsberg to the board that made the investment decisions.

The relationship between Mike Rounds and Skjonsberg has been very close for over a decade. “My life took a 180-degree turn,” Skjonsberg recalled years ago when remembering the moment Rounds picked the former campaign volunteer to become his chief of staff after winning the gubernatorial election in 2002, calling the experience “one of the greatest opportunities and privileges in my life.” Since then, Skjonsberg’s stock in state politics has been rising, as he has co-founded a political consulting firm, taken on work for Rounds’s insurance company and was picked to serve as campaign manager to lead Rounds’s quest for the open Senate seat this November.

The ties extend into an investment scheme that appears to have violated state ethics guidelines. Records show that an economic-development board overseen by Skjonsberg and other Rounds supporters provided special tax incentives and other state assistance to start-up companies that are part of the portfolio of a boutique investment firm called Lake Sharpe Investments. Lake Sharpe, which is run by Skjonsberg, counts Rounds as a personal investor to the project, according to documents obtained by The Nation.

In January of 2013, Skjonsberg was appointed by current Governor Daugaard to the South Dakota Board of Economic Development, a department within the Office of Economic Development tasked with promoting economic growth through loans, tax credits and other programs to boost local businesses. Six months prior to the appointment, Skjonsberg formed Lake Sharpe Investments, a company in which Rounds holds a position and an investor.

Lake Sharpe, through a private equity firm called Nordic Venture Partners, holds a number of investments in start-up companies, including an electronics fashion company. Two of the firm’s investments are in South Dakota: Novita LLC, a start-up developing corn-oil technology and Design Tanks, a firm that manufactures fiber-glass storage tanks for the gas and agriculture industry. Skojnsberg is reportedly an expert in crop-fuel technology. He previously served as a lobbyist for POET, one of the state’s largest ethanol producers, and as a founding board member of Growth Energy, a trade association for the ethanol industry.

Novita has been one of the largest recipients of state aid through a Board of Economic Development program that assists companies with upfront costs associated with expanding operations. On September 17, 2013, the state announced the firm would receive $771, 082 from the program. Twice this year, including as recently as August, the board voted to extend the permit for Novita given construction delays. The Board of Economic Development has also provided loans to the fiber-glass storage company partially owned by the Skjonsberg-Rounds investment firm. Records show the state board REDI loan program provided $900,000 to Design Tanks.

Skjonsberg, a member of the Board of Economic Development, voted in support of the permit extensions on behalf of Novita, according to minutes of board meetings.

South Dakota administrative rules state that Board of Economic Development members may not “participate in or vote upon a decision of the board relating to an applicant or loan servicing action relating to a borrower in which that individual has a direct personal or financial interest.”

“If there is a conflict, the burden is on the board member to let the other board members know,” says Jeff Erickson, the chairman of the Board of Economic Development. “They then are not allowed or able to vote. They have to recuse themselves not only from the discussion but also the vote.” Asked about Skjonsberg’s investment in Novita LLC, Erickson said he could not recall the vote or Skjonsberg ever informing the board of his investment but said if he holds a stake in any firms applying for economic assistance, “he would have needed to disclose that and recuse himself.”

Tony Klein, the secretary of the board, also could not recall if Skjonsberg disclosed his investment into Novita but said recusals are noted in the board meeting minutes. A review of the minutes shows no such disclosure.

In response to an e-mail from The Nation, Skjonsberg provided the following statement:

I am a member of a LLC. That LLC is subsequently invested in a separate fund. That separate investment fund, twice removed, has their own independent management and they make their own investment decisions. I am not fully versed on the investments, now three times removed, made by this separate fund—but nonetheless I’ve come to understand that the perception of a conflict has arisen. I’ve advised both the commissioner and the board chair that I have taken steps to ensure the perceived conflict is avoided in the future.

J. Pat Costello, the commissioner of the Governor’s Office of Economic Development, which oversees the board, e-mailed The Nation to say that Skjonsberg was not present for the discussion of the merits of the Novita application and only voted for permit extension requests. Asked if the ethics rules prohibiting board conflicts of interest applied to Skjonsberg’s votes on the Novita permit extension, Costello e-mailed to say, “Yes, the ethics rule apply to all related votes including the extensions.”

The money granted to the firm has not yet been delivered.

The claim that Skjonsberg wasn’t aware of his own investments surprised Cory Allen Heidelberger, a left-leaning watchdog blogger in the state. “What’s disturbing is that he did not recognize this when he got on the board. I find it incredible that he claims he didn’t know that big chunks of his money were going to this particular project,” Heidelberger told The Nation.

“This situation, when we look at the context of what was going on with EB-5, they seem they think they are entitled to pad their own interests, and no one will catch them with their hand in the cookie jar,” he adds.

Ethics forms show that the value of Rounds’s investment in Lake Sharpe, the firm with a stake in Novita and other start-ups, increased from between $15,000 and $50,000 in 2012 and early 2013 to between $50,000 and $100,000 in the following reporting period. (Senate disclosures allow candidates to disclose investments in a range of values rather than a specific amount).

Other Economic Development Board members hold close ties to the former governor. Board member Mike Lukens, who raised the permit extension for Novita, was originally appointed by Rounds. Board members Dale Clement, Ted Hustead, Greg Heineman and John Calvin are donors to Rounds’s US Senate campaign committee.

As governor, Rounds used the Office of Economic Development to effectively privatize the EB-5 program by providing a no-bid contract to a private company called SDRC Inc. to administer the effort, which grants American visas to foreigners who invest at least $500,000 into job-creating US companies. Northern Beef Packers, one high-profile EB-5 project in South Dakota, raised nearly $100 million from the EB-5 program, while executives from SDRC pocketed millions of dollars through fees. Just two days before leaving office, Richard Benda, then secretary of development under Rounds, approved a $600,000 loan to Northern Beef Packers. Benda then joined SRDC and was accused of using investment project money to pay a personal loan. Soon after Northern Beef Packers received increased state assistance, the firm declared bankruptcy.

The EB-5 under Rounds has also been accused of lax oversight and few safeguards to prevent fraud in other investments in the state. Federal investigators have subpoenaed the state economic development office, and state investigators are reportedly probing the involvement of Rounds and his administration in the EB-5 program. Last year, Benda died in circumstances that are widely believed to indicate suicide.

The Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, which allowed corporate and union money to flow freely in American elections, rested on a critical assumption: that so-called outside groups would not corrupt the political system because they would be legally separated from the candidates. In his majority opinion, Justice Anthony Kennedy acknowledged that without a fire wall between the candidates and outside groups making “independent expenditures,” deep-pocketed donors would come to have an undue influence over politicians. “By definition,” Kennedy wrote confidently, “an independent expenditure is political speech presented to the electorate that is not coordinated with a candidate.”

In the wake of the ruling, however, candidates have been forging close bonds with the outside groups from which they are supposedly independent, but that are spending vast sums to put them in office. Often the sharing of consultants and ad makers means that any “fire wall” is merely symbolic. But there have been no consequences for these potential violations of federal law, because there’s been no enforcement of the law, thanks to partisan gridlock at the Federal Elections Commission (FEC).

The growing phenomenon has been showcased by both Republican and Democratic candidates in the marquee races of the current election cycle.

GOP Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader and the loudest voice on Capitol Hill in support of private influence over election campaigns, is relying upon a constellation of outside groups to shore up his re-election bid as he faces one of the toughest challenges in years, from Democrat Alison Lundergan Grimes. In many cases, the pro-McConnell outside groups have close personal links to the candidate and his campaign.

Take Larry McCarthy, the veteran Republican political television producer, who rose to fame in 1984 for creating the “Hound Dog” spot that catapulted McConnell to the Senate (one of the “Top 10 Game-Changing Political Ads of All Time,” according to Advertising Age). Today, McCarthy is simultaneously working for McConnell and for a Super PAC that is legally barred from coordinating with the candidate, American Crossroads, which, along with its 501(c)(4) affiliate, Crossroads GPS, has spent over $1.6 million on the Kentucky race. In the 2012 presidential election, McCarthy crafted ads for many of the leading anti-Obama Super PACs, but in deference to federal law prohibiting coordination between outside money and candidates, he did not work directly for Mitt Romney. Since then, the ad maker has apparently dispensed with any concerns about juggling work from candidates and from unregulated outside groups.

Consider, also, the fact that Josh Holmes, McConnell’s chief of staff and campaign adviser, is married to Blair Latoff Holmes, the media director of the US Chamber of Commerce, a corporate-funded nonprofit that has spent more than $1 million to boost McConnell. And that, this past summer, the Koch brothers–backed Americans for Prosperity hired a director for its newly opened Kentucky branch—the wife of a member of McConnell’s Senate staff.

Both the Chamber and Americans for Prosperity are prohibited from coordinating with McConnell’s campaign on explicit efforts to re-elect the senator. But discussions between a husband and wife would undoubtedly be regarded as beyond the purview of campaign regulators, who have already shown a lack of interest in enforcing or investigating the no-coordination rules.

* * *

The FEC remains gridlocked by a 3-3 partisan split among its commissioners, with all three Republicans voting in lockstep to block any serious investigation of illegal coordination. Though staff may review allegations of wrongdoing, the FEC may only formally open an investigation with the approval of at least four commissioners. The current Republican chair of the commission, Lee Goodman, was recommended by McConnell himself. The FEC has provided what experts decry as a narrow definition of coordination and has declined to follow up on multiple requests to look into potential violations of the law. The Campaign Legal Center, a nonprofit that lobbies for campaign-finance limits, has filed nearly a dozen complaints with the agency to request an inquiry into illegal coordination since 2010, but the FEC has failed to act.

“The FEC has some incredibly gifted and hardworking employees,” says Ciara Torres-Spelliscy, an associate professor at Stetson University College of Law. “Unfortunately, at the commission level, the FEC was designed to fail and does. But deadlock after deadlock at the FEC leaves the distinct impression that if an electoral spender breaks the rules, there is little risk of legal sanction.”

Beyond the FEC, the only federal agency that could plausibly take up the charge is the Justice Department, which has historically deferred most action back to the FEC. Although the Justice Department has independent authority to act on the criminal provisions of campaign-finance law, which apply when a violation is “knowing and willful,” it pursues very few cases.

* * *

Eagle-eyed campaign watchers have noticed that outside-spending groups often air their advertisements just as the candidate’s own ads go off the air, meaning that voters never stop seeing ads from a certain point of view, as Bloomberg News reported in August. Increasingly, the ads even carry the same theme and identical cuts of B-roll footage. These trends are on display in the competitive Senate elections this year, from New Hampshire to Alaska. While some have theorized that the candidates and outside groups communicate via public “dumps” of video and information—which may be the case in some instances—an easier route for coordination exists: simply hiring the same consultants and media agencies.

Just as McConnell and the American Crossroads groups share an ad producer (the aforementioned Larry McCarthy), they also share a media-buying agency, Mentzer Media, which has flooded the Kentucky race with ads critical of McConnell’s Democratic opponent. The Towson, Maryland–based agency has collected over $4 million this year from Crossroads (for ad buys in races across the country) and $3.2 million from McConnell.

What’s more, American Crossroads—like other outside groups active in the Kentucky Senate race—has leadership that hails from McConnell’s inner circle. The group’s president is Steven Law, McConnell’s former chief of staff in the Senate in the 1990s and a former adviser to his wife, Elaine Chao, when she served as President George W. Bush’s secretary of labor. Law also sits on the board of Kentuckians for Strong Leadership, a Super PAC focused solely on supporting McConnell’s re-election this year.

Another pro-McConnell outside group, the Kentucky Opportunity Coalition, a nonprofit that doesn’t disclose its donors, counts several McConnell alumni among its team, including its spokesman, J. Scott Jennings, a consultant to McConnell’s two previous re-election campaigns. Jennings’s group has aired ads that feature video released by McConnell’s campaign.

The practice of outside groups sharing consultants with the candidate’s campaign is often masked by an array of subsidiaries and companies with little identifying information.

Since July, for example, Representative Ron Barber of Arizona has contracted with GMMB, the powerhouse Democratic advertising company, to produce advertisements. And throughout this year, House Majority PAC, a Democratic-aligned Super PAC, has created advertising in opposition to Martha McSally, Barber’s Republican opponent in the race. House Majority PAC employed a company called Waterfront Strategies, a consulting firm that lacks a website but shares an office with GMMB. As the Huffington Post reported, Waterfront is in fact “an internal branch of GMMB” run by a GMMB managing partner. The same address is also shared by yet another Democratic media-buying firm, Great American Media, which is also employed by several campaign committees. Though Barber is prohibited from coordinating with House Majority PAC, his own campaign consultants manage the outside-money attacks on his opponent.

When contacted for comment, GMMB e-mailed a statement saying, “We take the law and compliance with the law very seriously. To ensure the most stringent security and client confidentiality, we’ve put in place strict firewalls, separate financial streams and password-protected areas on our computer networks.”

McSally’s campaign has its own ties to outside groups, which share office space with firms working for the candidate. Just beyond the exit ramp off the George Washington Parkway in Alexandria, Virginia, a large building houses a half-dozen GOP campaign-consulting firms, including Purple Strategies, OnMessage, National Media Public Affairs and American Media. The McSally campaign directly employs OnMessage at the same time that YG Action, a GOP Super PAC aiding her campaign, retains National Media Public Affairs.

Another collection of firms sharing the same address resides across town on Canal Street. This office space was profiled by The New York Times in 2012 because of the then-novel appearance of multiple firms balancing their work for Republican outside groups alongside their work for the Romney campaign. One firm at this address, Crossroads Media, is now employed by the GOP Senate campaigns of Dan Sullivan in Alaska and Pat Roberts in Kansas. The Super PAC American Crossroads, which is active in both races, contracts with a firm called Main Street Media, a company with no website but with the same employees as Crossroads Media as well as the same address.

In mid-October, a Democratic group, the American Democracy Legal Fund, filed a complaint alleging that the Republican National Committee has engaged in a brazen violation of the FEC’s coordination rules by contracting directly with a voter-targeting firm that also provides services to the largest pro-GOP outside groups, including nonprofits associated with the Koch brothers.

Still, experts are pessimistic about enforcement action. Daniel Weiner, counsel for the Brennan Center’s Democracy Program and a former attorney for FEC Commissioner Ellen Weintraub, mentioned numerous potential instances of collusion. “If you had an enforcement agency that was actually committed to getting to the bottom of this stuff, some of that might have violated the FEC’s coordination rules,” Weiner says. “But it doesn’t really work when you’ve got an agency that dismisses these cases before they’ve even been investigated, and that’s what we have happening today.

“It strains credulity that there is no coordination as the ordinary American would understand it.”

In an election that could propel Senator Mitch McConnell to become Senate majority leader—a position that would give him wide sway over climate change policy, including influence over the Environmental Protection Agency—, the Kentucky politician declined to respond to a question earlier this month about whether he believes climate change is a real problem. “I’m not a scientist,” McConnell responded in an interview with The Cincinnati Enquirer’s editorial board.

But earlier in his career, when McConnell played a pivotal role on behalf of the tobacco industry against increasing government regulation and taxes, the Republican leader believed he had enough scientific knowledge to question public-health officials.

“There clearly is insufficient science or logic to justify this extreme action,” McConnell said in 1993, at the time enraged that the government had proposed a ban on smoking in federal buildings.

Starting in the 1980s when he joined the US Senate, McConnell sent multiple letters to regulators to question the science behind efforts to curb indoor smoking. In 1995, citing a CRS report, McConnell joined with three other senators to call into question the claim that indoor cigarette smoking causes “increased cancer risk.”

The close working relationship between McConnell and tobacco firms is spelled out in detail as a result of litigation that forced the disclosure of thousands of company documents. E-mails and letters show that representatives of tobacco firms R.J. Reynolds and Philip Morris guided McConnell behind the scenes, providing the senator with talking points that he later used to criticize the FDA for proposing anti-smoking rules. As the Lexington Herald-Leader reported, tobacco industry “attorneys helped draft a bill [McConnell] filed to protect their companies from lawsuits, as well as his correspondence to the White House to oppose federal smoking-prevention programs.”

In many ways, McConnell’s willingness to help big tobacco was rewarded. The Nation has identified twenty-two different notes from McConnell and his staff to tobacco lobbyists, thanking them for various gifts. “Thank you so much for sending me the beautiful ham,” wrote McConnell in one such note to a representative of the Tobacco Institute. Other letters thank tobacco reps for their gifts of “delicious pecan candies,” “luscious citrus fruit,” Ringo Starr tickets and other tickets to various theater performances and football games.

The biggest payoff for McConnell’s advocacy related to election money. After helping to “kill a proposal to curb youth smoking,” McConnell reportedly asked an R.J. Reynolds lobbyist for $200,000 in campaign money for Republican senators. Philip Morris later provided the senator with $150,000 for GOP campaigns, according to a report by the Herald-Leader’s John Cheves.

When McConnell provided his “I’m not a scientist” response, he was quickly attacked by critics for a feckless dodge, particularly given the fact that US senators must decide on a range of national policies regardless of professional experience.

Seen through another prism, McConnell’s reply echoes the overriding concerns of his new campaign benefactors: the fossil-fuel industry. Peabody Energy and Alliance Resource Partners, two coals firms, now rank among McConnell’s top campaign donors. Other campaign outfits designed to boost McConnell’s election prospects are funded by oil and coal interests. Americans for Prosperity, the advocacy group backed by the oil and gas billionaire Koch brothers, set up a Kentucky chapter this year to boost get-out-the-vote efforts. Kentuckians for Strong Leadership, a Super PAC set up to help McConnell’s campaign, also counts oil and coal companies as major donors.

“Money plays a role in almost every decision Mitch McConnell makes,” says David Donnelly, president of Every Voice, a campaign-reform group that is spending money in the election this year. “In the ’90s, he shilled for tobacco as the industry promised him and his colleagues protection and now, with energy billionaires and oil companies fueling his campaigns, he’s covering for them on climate policy.”

Read some of the letters between McConnell’s office and tobacco lobbyists here, courtesy of the University of California, San Francisco’s archives:

Mitch McConnell and the Tobacco Lobbyists by TheNationMagazine

This story was reported in partnership with the Investigative Fund at the Nation Institute.

In his book, Finding the Next Starbucks: How to Identify and Invest in the Hot Stocks of Tomorrow, Michael Moe describes how carefully crafted business strategies have transformed markets to create huge profits in unlikely sectors. The title relates to how Starbucks became a global corporation of almost $15 billion in revenue by capturing and streamlining the café experience. Moe, a former director at Merrill Lynch, wrote that at one point in the United States, even healthcare was an undesirable and difficult industry for investment, and that bankers once worried if profit-making in such a realm was worth their effort. In 1970, healthcare spending comprised 8 percent of GDP, yet market capitalization in healthcare stood at less than 3 percent. That shifted quickly not only as the boomer generation aged, but as a wave of privatization hit hospitals, insurers, and other segments of the healthcare system. More than thirty years later, Moe wrote, healthcare companies are among the largest in the world, and represent more than 16 percent of US capital markets. “We see the education industry today as the healthcare industry of 30 years ago,” Moe predicted.

That book came out eight years ago, before the current wave of education investing, when the prospect for growth seemed dim. Unlike in healthcare, energy and other areas of the economy that have moved from public to private hands, K-through-12 education has stubbornly remained largely out of the control of investors.

Next year, the market size of K-12 education is projected to be $788.7 billion. And currently, much of that money is spent in the public sector. “It’s really the last honeypot for Wall Street,” says Donald Cohen, the executive director of In the Public Interest, a think tank that tracks the privatization of roads, prisons, schools and other parts of the economy.

That might be changing soon as barriers to investment are rapidly fading. As Eric Hippeau, a partner with Lerer Ventures, the venture capital firm behind viral entertainment company BuzzFeed and several education start-ups, has argued, despite the opposition of “unions, public school bureaucracies, and parents,” the “education market is ripe for disruption.”

Hippeau’s vision is the growing sentiment among investors. Education technology firms secured a record $1.25 billion in investments across 378 deals in 2013, while analysts predict that number will continue to surge this year. Since 2010, Moe has led what has been billed as the premiere education investment conference, which takes place annually in Scottsdale, Arizona. The first year attracted around 370 people and 55 presenting companies. This year, that number soared to over 2,000 with over 290 presenting companies and speeches by luminaries including former Governor Jeb Bush, Magic Johnson and Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker. One of the largest start-ups, a Herndon, Virginia–based company called K12 Inc., a for-profit largely online charter chain, posted nearly $1 billion in annual revenue for its last fiscal year in August.

Many are attempting to duplicate that success. “There’s a dramatic shift in how investors are thinking about this industry,” Fahad Hassan, an education entrepreneur with his own venture-backed start-up, told a meeting of entrepreneurs earlier this year.

The explosion of investor interest in education raises a number of questions, among them: What kind of influence will the for-profit education sector attempt to exert over education policy? And if school reform is crafted to maximize the potential for investor profit, will students benefit, as boosters claim—or will they suffer?

There’s also the question of the effect of privatization on costs. And there, the healthcare example gives reason for concern. The privatization of health services has corresponded closely with skyrocketing costs, leaving millions of Americans without access to care or deeply in debt for seeking treatment for their illnesses. While new laws, including the Affordable Care Act, have extended insurance coverage to some 10 million Americans, many remain without coverage. The United States still spends $8,745 per capita on healthcare, far above the average for all other industrialized countries.

The tantalizing prospect of tapping into the K-12 market has drummed up new level of zeal from education reformers.

A good barometer of this passion is a document distributed by Moe, who now leads a firm called GSV Capital, which invests heavily in education start-ups including Knewton Inc. and Avenues, a New York–based private school with plans to expand into a global chain. Like any sweeping manifesto, his education reform blueprint sets the stage by listing massive social upheavals—the Arab Spring, the Fall of the Berlin Wall and the Spanish Civil War—and asks, for the “Second American Revolution,” one fought to decide the fate of education policy, “Which side of history will we be on?”

The revolution GSV goes on to describe is a battle to control the fate of America’s K-12 education system. Noting that this money is still controlled by public entities, or what’s referred in the document as “the old model,” the GSV paper calls for reformers to join the “education battlefield.” (A colorful diagram depicts “unions” and “status quo” forces equipped with muskets across businesses and other “change agents” equipped with a fighter jet and a howitzer.) The GSV manifesto declares, “we believe the opportunity to build numerous multi-billion dollar education enterprises is finally real.”

This opportunity exists in part because of major policy changes under the Obama administration. States moving to adopt the federal government’s Common Core standards, which include new standardized testing requirements, have incentivized the private sector to provide solutions to schools. According to Paul Irby, a market analyst with Onvia, states striving to implement the new standards could spend upwards of $12 billion, with much of the money going to updating IT, professional development for teachers, and testing technology.

Moreover, the Obama administration’s signature “Race to the Top” program, which provides states with large cash grants in exchange for changing how students and teachers are evaluated, is being viewed as a potential cash cow for education start-ups. In a blog post, Alex Hernandez, a partner with the Charter School Growth Fund, writes that school districts are “raising more money than you can shake a stick at” and the money granted to local school systems from Race to the Top may be used on the latest tech innovations. The most recent round of Race to the Top Funding, he adds, means districts “should be unwrapping new toys for a while.”

The Department of Education under Obama has seen a flow of revolving door hires from the education investment community. In May of this year, the Senate confirmed Ted Mitchell, the chief executive of the NewSchools Venture Fund, as the Under Secretary for the US Department of Education. Prior to his government position, Mitchell, a personal investor in an array of education start-ups, forged a partnership last year with the creators of Facebook app FarmVille to create new education game products. James Shelton, the Deputy Secretary, is a longtime education investor and the former co-founder of LearnNow, a charter chain that was sold to Edison Learning, a for-profit charter management company.

In an interview with EdSurge, a trade outlet, Shelton explained that the Common Core standards will allow education companies to produce products that “can scale across many markets,” overcoming the “fragmented procurement market” that has plagued investors seeking to enter the K-12 sector. Moreover, Shelton and his team manage an education innovation budget, awarding grants to charter schools and research centers to advance the next breakthrough in education technology. Increased research and development in education innovation, Shelton wrote in testimony to Congress, will spark the next “equivalent of Google or Microsoft to lead the global learning technology market.” He added, “I want it to be a US company.”

The other transformative changes come from the state and local level as a new class of politicians, including scores of Democratic mayors and Republican legislators and state officials, have ushered in new laws in recent years to divert taxpayer funding to charter schools, which are often run as for-profit companies and are more willing to embrace tech-centric classroom solutions than their public sector counterparts. In many states, including Florida, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and Ohio, parents may opt to apply the amount the state would normally spend on their child’s education (between roughly $5,000 to $10,000) to send their children to a charter.

The opening up of the K-12 money for privately run schools, through charter schools or through vouchers applied to private schools, with restrictions on launching charter schools increasingly relaxed in many states, has created a boom in charter businesses hoping to persuade parents to trust their children, along with their money, with them. At present, more than 4 percent of students are enrolled at the more than 6,000 charter schools in operation. Few figures exist on how many of these students are taught by for-profit operators (in most states, charter schools must be registered as nonprofits, though they may outsource their operations to proprietary companies.)

The breakneck speed at which these schools have taken off, often with little oversight, has led to scandals. Since 2013, the FBI has investigated more than five charter schools in Illinois, Indiana, Ohio and beyond on suspicion that management has misplaced or stolen funds. In Florida, a state with famously lenient rules for operating charters and among the highest concentration for-profit K through 12 schools, the Miami Herald has reported on a continuing laundry list of poorly run charters: students going weeks without textbooks, class attendance sheets faked, and children charged illegal fees for standard courses. In a growing phenomenon, one Florida for-profit company, Academica, has earned over $19 million a year by charging leasing fees to public school land already owned by its charter schools.

Does free market competition ensure accountability in education by turning bad operators into economic losers? That’s what privatizers claim, but the record so far suggests otherwise.

K12 Inc., the for-profit charter behemoth that enrolls 123,259 students, went public in 2007 with the help of Moe’s previous investment firm, and has since been a darling of Wall Street. In January of this year, students from Newark Prep Charter School, which is K12 Inc.-operated, joined executives from the company to ring in the bell of the New York Stock Stock Exchange. In Moe’s revolutionary manifesto, K12 Inc. is listed as among the businesses he considers the “special forces” that will remake the education landscape.

The rising revenues of K12 Inc. have been matched by poor performance. In the 2010-2011 school year, only 27.7 percent of K12 Inc.-operated schools met the Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) standard, far below the 52 percent average of brick and mortar public schools. An investigation in Colorado, where K12 Inc. has been ejected from several school districts, found that nearly half of online students left within a year, and when those students returned to brick and mortar schools, they were further behind academically than when they started. Similar investigations in Florida and Ohio found K12 Inc. teachers instructing classes without certification and instructing online classes of over 250 students.

In several states, K12 Inc.-operated virtual charter schools have faced a backlash because of poor performance and high drop-out rates. In July, Tennessee’s education commissioner announced the closure of the Tennessee Virtual Academy, K12 Inc.’s affiliate school, at the end of the 2014-2015 school year because of the charter’s failure to score above the state’s lowest level of academic achievement. Last month, Pennsylvania’s Agora Cyber Charter School, the largest school managed by K12 Inc., voted to consider ending its relationship with the company after revelations that the school allegedly manipulated attendance sheets and performance data in an attempt to conceal incredibly high rates of student turnover.

Still, despite wave after wave of negative press, K12 Inc. figures as a solid investment opportunity to many. Baird Equity Research, in a giddy note to investors this year about the potential growth of K12 Inc., noted, “capturing just two million (3.5%) of the addressable market yields a market opportunity of approximately $12 billion … Over the next three years, we believe that the company is capable of 7%+ organic revenue growth with modest margin expansion.” How will it achieve this growth? According to Baird, K12 Inc.’s “competency in lobbying in new states” is “another key point of differentiation.” The analyst note describes “K12’s success in working closely with state policymakers and school districts to enable the expansion of virtual schools into new states or districts” as a key asset. “The company has years of experience in successfully lobbying to get legislation passed to allow virtual schools to operate,” Baird concludes.

Indeed, K12 Inc.’s spectactular growth over the years stems largely from the extraordinary amount the company spends on lobbying, as well as on marketing and advertising, with promises in some areas that enrollment comes with a free computer. USA Today found that the company spent $21.5 million on advertising in the first eight months of 2012. The company sponsors billboards, radio advertisements, and spots on children’s cable television.

K12 Inc.’s lobbyists helped author model legislation to develop sweeping voucher laws through the American Legislative Exchange Council, a conservative group that provides state lawmakers with template legislation. Though state by state lobbying figures are difficult to come by, given the patchwork of varying laws, K12 Inc. has hired dozens of local officials to ensure that these voucher laws are quickly passed with few amendments. “We have incurred significant lobbying costs in several states,” K12 Inc. noted in a filing with the SEC.

“The stockholders benefit from those students’ enrollments, but the students get stuck with a lousy education that will follow them the rest of their lives,” says Jeff Bryant, the director of the Education Opportunity Network.

Nevertheless, Moe and his cohort have pledged to grow the industry by leaps and bounds in coming years. At the last two conference he organized, there was talk of organizing a bipartisan campaign to persuade 2016 presidential candidates to sign onto a statement of principles endorsing charters and other education innovations. The pledge also called for the federal government to create new tax incentives for spending on education companies akin to a health savings account.

At the last conference in April, Moe closed on an optimistic note. “How do you balance this whole idea between making a profit and helping kids?” he asked. “The way that we think we’re going to create the greatest returns for our investors is by investing in companies that have the greatest educational impact.”

Read more from our special education issue

Kenzo Shibata: “5 Books to Build a Movement for Education Justice”

Dana Goldstein: “The Tough Lessons of the 1968 Teacher Strikes”

Michelle Fine and Michael Fabricant: “What It Takes to Unite Teachers Unions and Communities of Color”

Daniel Denvir: “How to Destroy a Public School System”

Pedro Noguera: “Why Don’t We Have Real Data on Charter Schools?”

Diane Ravitch: “The Secret to Eva Moskowitz’s ‘Success’”

Gordon Lafer: “What Happens When Your Teacher Is a Robot?”

The Obama administration has signaled a new effort to partner with the Saudi Arabian government as its key ally in the region against the Sunni militia group in Syria and Iraq known as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), dispatching Secretary of State John Kerry to Jeddah for a heavily symbolic meeting with the Saudi king on the September 11 anniversary this fall.

At the same time, however, Washington remains saturated with Saudi money and the influence it buys, even as the US economy’s dependence on imports of Saudi crude oil has waned.

The Saudi lobbying presence manifests itself in a variety of ways.

Disclosures show that the latest addition to the Saudi government payroll includes former US Senator Norm Coleman, a Republican from Minnesota who leads one of the largest Super PACs in the country.

Many influential nonprofits in Washington have relied upon Saudi government support. The confirmation hearing for Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel revealed that the Atlantic Council, a think tank that advises lawmakers on foreign policy, received contributions from Saudi Arabia, among other foreign governments. (Such legally and ethically questionable financial relationships between think tanks and foreign governments were scrutinized in a lengthy New York Times exposé on September 6, 2014, and there is now a move afoot to require disclosure of such ties for congressional testimony.) Hagel previously served as chairman to the organization. The Saudi government has also provided funds to what is now known as the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation, the Middle East Policy Council, the Middle East Institute and the Smithsonian Freer Museum of Art.

Several organizations connected to the kingdom play an active role in policy debates. Khalid Alnaji, a registered agent of the Saudi government and president of the US subsidiary of the Saudi Arabian national oil company ARAMCO, sits on the board of the American Petroleum Institute, the powerful lobby group that funds several conservative nonprofits and sponsors election-season television advertisements. On September 17, the former Ambassador Robert Ford, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on the need to arm Syrian rebel groups.

Throughout the years, Saudi Arabia has retained numerous law and lobbying firms to influence American public opinion and policy.

The contract to work with Coleman was registered in July through Hogan Lovells, a law firm where Coleman has worked since 2011, after being defeated in his re-election campaign in 2008.

In addition to Hogan Lovells, the Saudi government counts several other firms, including Squire Patton Boggs and Qorvis-MSLGROUP, as part of its lobbying operation. As Al-Monitor reported, the Saudi kingdom’s relationship with “Qorvis dates back to 2001, when then-Saudi Ambassador Bandar bin Sultan inked a $3.2 million deal for an image makeover after ‘favorability toward Saudi Arabia…declined significantly’ among ‘Washington insiders’ in the wake of the terror attacks.”

Qorvis-MSLGROUP’s latest disclosure reveals that the firm has suggested story ideas to The Weekly Standard and NPR, and pitched other interviews on behalf of the Saudi government. The disclosure also shows that the Saudi Embassy, through Qorvis-MSLGROUP, manages the Twitter account @SyrCoalition, which is touted as the “official” voice of the Syrian opposition to Bashar al-Assad.

What’s notable about the hiring of Coleman is that he appears to be the first leader of a significant Super PAC to simultaneously lobby for a foreign government.

Coleman is the chairman of two groups that have channeled big money into congressional races this year, the American Action Network and the Congressional Leadership Fund. The committees have aired ads in a number of races, and according to a report last week in Politico, the pair will spend over $8.1 million this fall on ten different congressional races to boost Republican candidates. The American Action Network is a 501(c)4 nonprofit, meaning it can engage in election activity without disclosing its donors, while the Congressional Leadership Fund is a registered Super PAC. If the groups make good on their promise to spend over $8 million, they would rank among the top three largest Super PACs in the country this campaign cycle.

Although lobbyists for domestic corporate and union interests have helmed Super PACs and big spending efforts in the past, Coleman’s dual role as a Saudi lobbyist and a leader of the twin campaign entities appears unprecedented.

“Regrettably, even former lawmakers serving as hired guns for foreign governments is not unusual. But this is the first I’ve heard of a revolver serving both on the lobbying side for a foreign government and running a domestic campaign spending operation through a super PAC and dark money nonprofit group, which are not supposed to receive or spend foreign money in our elections,” said Craig Holman, a lobbying expert with Public Citizen, in an e-mail to The Nation. “This type of com[m]ingling of roles is ripe for abuse and is most difficult to monitor,” he added.

In March of this year, Hogan Lovells, which maintains longstanding ties to the Saudi government, renewed its annual contract with the Royal Embassy of Saudi Arabia for a retainer of $60,000 per month. Four months later, Hogan Lovells filed a form with the Department of Justice, which administers the foreign lobbying registration system, to notify the agency that Coleman would be “providing legal services to the Royal Embassy of Saudi Arabia” on issues including “policy developments involving Iran.”

The firm is also involved in responding to the upheaval in Syria. According to disclosures filed by the firm, Hogan Lovells arranged meetings on behalf of their Saudi clients with the chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, Congressman Ed Royce, to discuss “Middle East peace issues regarding Syria, Iran, etc.” The documents disclosed by Hogan Lovells make clear the firm engages in a broad array of foreign policy matters on behalf of the embassy, including “advice on legislative, regulatory and public policy activities of interest.”

Saudi Arabia’s interests in the region include the sectarian-motivated campaign of countering the rise of Shiite power. In 2011, Saudi Arabia dispatched soldiers to put down protesting Shiite demonstrators in neighboring Bahrain. With the civil war in Syria, the closest ally to Shiite Iran, Saudi Arabia became the largest supplier of weapons to Syrian rebel groups fighting to oust forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

As the Obama administration has opened nuclear negotiations with Iran and refused to bomb Assad last year, Saudi Arabia has sought to forcefully shape the conflict in Syria on its own, and has reportedly stepped up weapons shipments to Syrian rebels, including to Islamic militants tied to Al Qaeda and other anti-American forces.

“The Saudis have very generically been interested in maintaining the balance of power in the region, in which they play a predominate role, and their geopolitical interests, in which they counter Iran,” says Toby C. Jones, associate professor of history at Rutgers University. Part of the Saudi Kingdom’s political lobbying in Washington, Jones says, is to maintain “American military assurances to get done what they want done in the region.”

As the Hogan Lovells team continues to engage foreign affairs lawmakers, Coleman’s group has sought the defeat of at least one lawmaker with influence over Saudi Arabia policy. The American Action Network announced that it will spend $750,000 on television advertisements to defeat Congressman Ami Bera, a California Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Coleman’s groups are also planning to oppose Democratic incumbents including Ann Kirkpatrick of Arizona, Joe Garcia of Florida and Pete Gallego of Texas. The groups will target Virginia Democrat John Foust, who is running for an open seat against Republican candidate Barbara Comstock.

The role of Saudi Arabia as a partner to US efforts to thwart ISIS comes as human rights experts have decried persistent abuses in the country. Human Rights Watch reports that the government has “stepped up arrests, trials, and convictions of peaceful dissidents, and forcibly dispersed peaceful demonstrations by citizens.” The rights of women in Saudi Arabia, who face segregation in public places and are barred from driving cars, rank among the lowest in the world. American policymakers have reacted swiftly to the videotaped beheading of two American journalists by ISIS, but they have been less emphatic in denouncing the Saudi government for the draconian punishments it imposes according to its Wahhabist interpretation of Islamic law. Last month, the Saudi government executed twenty-two people in the span of two weeks, eight of whom were beheaded for crimes as minor as drug trafficking hashish and “sorcery.”

Further questions are also being raised about how Saudi involvement in the Syrian civil war has directly and indirectly assisted the rise of ISIS and other radical groups in Syria. A report this month filed by Conflict Armament Research, a London-based think tank, found that “M79 90 mm anti-tank rockets captured from IS forces in Syria are identical to M79 rockets transferred by Saudi Arabia to forces operating under the ‘Free Syrian Army’ umbrella in 2013.” A recent report from Agence France-Presse claimed that some Syrian rebel groups had recently signed a “non-aggression” pact with ISIS. The White House has strenuously denied such a pact exists.

The Saudi kingdom’s “primary interest is in overthrowing Assad,” says Jones, who is also the author of Desert Kingdom: How Oil and Water Forged Modern Saudi Arabia. “Who’s most likely to help them accomplish that? The Islamists on the ground, let’s put money into their pockets—and the consequence is ISIS.”

Numerous media reports and social media postings have linked individuals based in Kuwait, Qatar and Saudi Arabia with efforts to raise money for ISIS. One campaign run by a Saudi sheikh who is based in Syria and “close to Al Qaeda” operates a fundraising drive called “Wage Jihad With Your Money,” promising donors “silver” or “gold status” for those who provide money for bullets or mortar rounds, according to a report in The New York Times. The Saudi government, however, has denied allegations that it has financed terrorist groups such as ISIS.

The funding of ISIS remains a critical issue as the United States prepares to lead an international coalition against the radical group, and recent reports have claimed that private citizens in Saudi Arabia are funneling cash and other resources to the group. In 2010, according to cables released by Wikileaks, then–Secretary of State Hillary Clinton noted that “donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide.” Earlier this year, David S. Cohen, the US Treasury Department’s top official for terrorism and financial intelligence, praised Saudi Arabia for cracking down on Al Qaeda funding sources, but conceded that extremists in Syria have accessed donors in the kingdom and other gulf states.

Still, the United States has embraced plans to elevate the role of Saudi Arabia in the fight against ISIS. On September 10, Saudi officials announced that anti-ISIS fighters will be trained and equipped on a Saudi military base. After President Obama’s speech promising to lead a coalition against ISIS, another Saudi lobbyist, Ayal Frank, who works on behalf of the Saudi embassy through a contract with his employer, Qorvis-MSLGROUP, tweeted: “Fighting & defeating ‪#ISIS across both ‪#Iraq & ‪#Syria will make ‪@BarackObama a great president.” Another registered Saudi lobbyist with Qorvis-MSLGROUP, Matt Lauer, tweeted: “ISIS is reason carpet bombing exists.”

For Coleman, who also serves on the board of the National Endowment for Democracy, the job of Saudi lobbyist comes as somewhat of a role reversal from the senator’s work a decade ago. In 2005, Coleman signed onto a congressional letter condemning the Saudi government for distributing publications that preach a “Nazi-like hatred for Jews” and for spreading extremist ideology throughout the world.

Now, he will work to advance Saudi Arabia’s agenda in Washington. Two days after registering to lobby for the Saudi Royal Embassy, Coleman appeared at a foreign policy forum on Capitol Hill at the Hart Senate Building. Video from the event shows Coleman, who invoked the importance of working with Saudi Arabia, identified only as a former lawmaker. Toward the end of his talk, Coleman suggested that the Saudi Ambassador fears a nuclear weapons-armed Iran just as much as Israeli Ambassador Ron Dermer. “If you look at the Saudis and the Emiratis, the Israelis on issues of Iran, on issues on what’s happening in Syria, on issues of what’s happening in Iraq, on Hamas, Hezbollah—there is a confluence of interest,” he continued, asking why the United States has not staked out the same positions as its allies. “We should be hand in glove with our allies in the region on these issues.”

If you read enough news and watch enough cable television about the threat of the Islamic State, the radical Sunni Muslim militia group better known simply as IS, you will inevitably encounter a parade of retired generals demanding an increased US military presence in the region. They will say that our government should deploy, as retired General Anthony Zinni demanded, up to 10,000 American boots on the ground to battle IS. Or as in retired General Jack Keane’s case, they will make more vague demands, such as for “offensive” air strikes and the deployment of more military advisers to the region.

But what you won’t learn from media coverage of IS is that many of these former Pentagon officials have skin in the game as paid directors and advisers to some of the largest military contractors in the world. Ramping up America’s military presence in Iraq and directly entering the war in Syria, along with greater military spending more broadly, is a debatable solution to a complex political and sectarian conflict. But those goals do unquestionably benefit one player in this saga: America’s defense industry.

Keane is a great example of this phenomenon. His think tank, the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), which he oversees along with neoconservative partisans Liz Cheney and William Kristol, has provided the data on IS used for multiple stories by The New York Times, the BBC and other leading outlets.

Jack Keane (Screenshot: Fox News)

Keane has appeared on Fox News at least nine times over the last two months to promote the idea that the best way to stop IS is through military action—in particular, through air strikes deep into IS-held territory. In one of the only congressional hearings about IS over the summer, Keane was there to testify and call for more American military engagement. On Wednesday evening, Keane declared President Obama’s speech on defeating IS insufficient, arguing that a bolder strategy is necessary. “I truly believe we need to put special operation forces in there,” he told host Megyn Kelly.

Left unsaid during his media appearances (and left unmentioned on his congressional witness disclosure form) are Keane’s other gigs: as special adviser to Academi, the contractor formerly known as Blackwater; as a board member to tank and aircraft manufacturer General Dynamics; a “venture partner” to SCP Partners, an investment firm that partners with defense contractors, including XVionics, an “operations management decision support system” company used in Air Force drone training; and as president of his own consulting firm, GSI LLC.

To portray Keane as simply a think tank leader and a former military official, as the media have done, obscures a fairly lucrative career in the contracting world. For the General Dynamics role alone, Keane has been paid a six-figure salary in cash and stock options since he joined the firm in 2004; last year, General Dynamics paid him $258,006.

Keane did not immediately return a call requesting comment for this article.

Disclosure would also help the public weigh Keane’s policy advocacy. For instance, in his August 24 opinion column for The Wall Street Journal, in which he was bylined only as a retired general and the chairman of ISW, Keane wrote that “the time has come to confront the government of Qatar, which funds and arms IS and other Islamist terrorist groups such as Hamas.” While media reports have linked fundraisers for IS with individuals operating in Qatar (though not the government), the same could be said about Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, where many of the major donors of IS reportedly reside. Why did Keane single out Qatar and ignore Saudi Arabia and Kuwait? Is it because his company, Academi, has been a major business partner to the United Arab Emirates, Qatar’s primary rival in the region?

Other examples abound.

Anthony Zinni (Screenshot: Charlie Rose)

In a Washington Post story about Obama’s decision not to deploy troops to combat IS, retired Marine General James Mattis was quoted as a skeptic. “The American people will once again see us in a war that doesn’t seem to be making progress,” Mattis told the paper. Left unmentioned was Mattis’s new role as Keane’s colleague on the General Dynamics corporate board, a role that afforded Mattis $88,479 in cash and stock options in 2013.

Retired General Anthony Zinni, perhaps the loudest advocate of a large deployment of American soliders into the region to fight IS, is a board member to BAE Systems’ US subsidiary, and also works for several military-focused private equity firms.

CNN pundit Frances Townsend, a former Bush administration official, has recently appeared on television calling for more military engagement against IS. As the Public Accountability Initiative, a nonprofit that studies elite power structures, reported, Townsend “holds positions in two investment firms with defense company holdings, MacAndrews & Forbes and Monument Capital Group, and serves as an advisor to defense contractor Decision Sciences.”



Fran Townsend (Screenshot: CSPAN)

“Mainstream news outlets have a polite practice of identifying former generals and former congressmembers as simply ‘formers’—neglecting to inform the public of what these individuals are doing now, which is often quite pertinent information, like that they are corporate lobbyists or board members,” says Jeff Cohen, an associate professor of journalism at Ithaca College.

Media outlets might justify their omissions by reasoning that these pundits have merely advocated certain military strategies, not specific weapons systems, so disclosure of their financial stake in the policy need not be made. Yet the drumbeat for war has already spiraled into calls for increased military spending that lifts all boats—or non-operational jets for that matter.

When the Pentagon sent a recent $2 billion request for ramped-up operations in the Middle East, supposedly to confront the IS issue, budget details obtained by Bloomberg News revealed that officials asked for money for additional F-35 planes. The F-35 is not in operation and would not be used against IS. The plane is notoriously over budget and perpetually delayed—some experts call it the most expensive weapon system in human history—with a price tag now projected to be over $1 trillion. In July, an engine fire grounded the F-35 fleet and again delayed the planned debut of the plane. How it ended up in the Pentagon’s Middle East wish list is unclear.

“I think an inclination to use military action a lot is something the defense industry subscribes to because it helps to perpetuate an overall climate of permissiveness towards military spending,” says Ed Wasserman, dean of the UC Berkeley Graduate School for Journalism. Wasserman says that the media debate around IS has tilted towards more hawkish former military leaders, and that the public would be best served not only with better disclosure but also a more balanced set of opinions that would include how expanded air strikes could cause collateral civil casualties. ”The past fifty years has a lot of evidence of the ineffectiveness of air power when it comes to dealing with a more nimble guerrilla-type adversary, and I’m not hearing this conversation,” he notes.

The pro-war punditry of retired generals has been the subject of controversy in the past. In a much-cited 2008 exposé, The New York Times revealed a network of retired generals on the payroll of defense contractors who carefully echoed the Bush administration’s Iraq war demands through appearances on cable television. 



The paper’s coverage of the run-up to a renewed conflict in the region today has been notably measured, including many voices skeptical of calls for a more muscular military response to IS. Nonetheless, the Times has relied on research from a contractor-funded advocacy organization as part of its IS coverage. Reports produced by Keane’s ISW have been used to support six different infographics used for Times stories since June. The Times has not mentioned Keane’s potential conflict of interest or that ISW may have a vested stake in its policy positions. The Public Accountability Initiative notes that ISW’s corporate sponsors represent “a who’s who of the defense industry and includes Raytheon, SAIC, Palantir, General Dynamics, CACI, Northrop Grumman, DynCorp, and L-3 Communication.” As the business network CNBC reported this week, Raytheon in particular has much to gain from escalation in Iraq, as the company produces many of the missiles and radar equipment used in airstrikes.

In addition to providing reports and quotes for the media, ISW leaders have demanded a greater reaction to IS from the Obama administration. In The Weekly Standard this week, ISW president Kim Kagan wrote that President Obama’s call for a limited engagement against IS “has no chance of success.” 



ISW’s willingness to push the envelope has gotten the organization into hot water before. In 2013, ISW suffered an embarrassing spectacle when one of its analysts, Elizabeth O’Bagy, was found to have inflated her academic credentials, touting a PhD from a Georgetown program that she had never entered.

But memories are short, and the media outlets now relying heavily on ISW research have done little to scrutinize the think tank’s policy goals. Over the last two years, ISW, including O’Bagy, were forcefully leading the push to equip Syrian rebels with advanced anti-tank and anti-aircraft weaponry to defeat Bashar al-Assad.

For Keane, providing arms to Syrian rebels, even anti-American groups, was a worthwhile gamble. In an interview with Fox Business Network in May of last year, Keane acknowledged that arming Syrian rebels might mean “weapons can fall into radical Islamists’ hands.” He continued, “It is true the radical Islamists have gained in power and influence mainly because we haven’t been involved and that is a fact, but it’s still true we have vetted some of these moderate rebel groups with the CIA, and I’m convinced we can—it’s still acceptable to take that risk, and let’s get on with changing momentum in the war.” 

That acceptable risk Keane outlined has come to fruition. Recent reports now indicate that US-made weapons sent from American allies in the region to Syrian rebels have fallen into the hands of IS.

Keane, and ISW, is undeterred. The group just put out a call for 25,000 ground troops in Iraq and Syria.

One thing the public doesn’t hear about from the pro-war pundits on cable news: how military action in Iraq and Syria could benefit their pocket books. Lee Fang, a contributing writer with The Nation, appeared on Democracy Now! Monday morning to discuss his latest piece, “Who’s Paying the Pro-War Pundits?” In that piece and on the show, Fang describes how many of the pundits and contributors on cable news networks urging aggressive military escalation have conflicts of interest and current ties to military contractors that the public is unaware of. And those conflicts could be skewing public perception of the threat ISIS poses. “Military opinion is not monolithic,” Fang said. “But on many of these networks, you hear from a limited set of opinions.”
—Edward Hart

This post was originally published at RepublicReport.org

“Lifestyles of the Rich Environmentalists,” produced by a group called the Institute for Energy Research, is a slick web video campaign designed to lampoon Leonardo DiCaprio and will.i.am as hypocrites for supporting action on climate change. The claim is that wealthy celebrities who oppose industrial-scale pollution supposedly shouldn’t fly in airplanes that use fossil fuels. The group, along with its subsidiary, the American Energy Alliance, churns out a steady stream of related content, from Facebook memes criticizing the Environmental Protection Agency, to commercials demanding approval of new oil projects like the Keystone XL, to a series of television campaign advertisements this year attacking Democratic candidates in West Virginia, Colorado, North Carolina and Alaska. On Capitol Hill, IER aggressively opposes any effort to repeal tax breaks afforded to the oil and gas industry.

Documents obtained by Republic Report reveal for the first time that the group was actually founded by none other than Charles Koch, the petrochemical, manufacturing and oil refining tycoon worth an estimated $52 billion.

IER has no information about its founding members on its website, and only lists a board composed of seemingly independent conservative scholars and businessmen. Earlier reports revealed that IER/AEA has received grants from Koch-funded foundations, and that its leadership includes several individuals who have at times worked for Koch or Koch-related interests. But this is the first time it has been revealed that Charles personally founded the organization.

In October of 1984, Charles, then using a Menlo Park, California, address, founded a nonprofit called the Institute for Humane Studies of Texas. That organization briefly lost its charter in 1989 for failure to pay the Texas state franchise tax. Four years later, incorporation documents reveal, the group rebranded as the Institute for Energy Research, or IER, which later formed a subsidiary called the American Energy Alliance.

IER/AEA’s advocacy contrasts sharply with Charles’s personal brand as a selfless libertarian activist. The industrialist has argued that he is resolutely against special government handouts, such as tax credits or subsidies that benefit one industry over another. “Far from trying to rig the system, I have spent decades opposing cronyism and all political favors, including mandates, subsidies and protective tariffs—even when we benefit from them,” Charles wrote in a column for The Wall Street Journal this year.

But Charles’s group, IER/AEA, has fought to protect special tax breaks that benefit fossil fuel producers. Along with issuing press releases against various federal efforts to eliminate oil and gas industry tax credits, IER/AEA commissioned a study claiming that such tax reforms would have an adverse effect on jobs and on oil production.

Charles and his brother David are personally responsible for founding and funding much of the modern conservative infrastructure. The popular libertarian think tank the Cato Institute was, in fact, first named the Charles Koch Foundation, Inc. before rebranding. The largest political organization in America outside the Democratic and Republican parties is Americans for Prosperity, the Tea Party–organizing foundation also founded by the Kochs.

The latest organs in the Koch political network have carefully guarded the sources of their funding and direction. There is the new youth group Generation Opportunity, along with the new veterans-related campaign organization Concerned Veterans for America. But IER/AEA’s true origin casts new light on its motivations.

This post was originally published at RepublicReport.org

Louisiana Senator David Vitter made headlines on conservative websites in the last few days by releasing a report called “Chain of Environmental Command: How a Club of Billionaires and Their Foundations Control the Environmental Movement and Obama’s EPA.”

Below the lengthy title is a report that claims breathlessly that environmental and public health foundations are part of “a close knit network of likeminded funders, environmental activists, and government bureaucrats,” a cabal responsible for spreading “bogus propaganda disguised as science and news to spread an anti-fossil energy message to the unknowing public.”

The report goes on to list groups such as the American Lung Association and the Union of Concerned Scientists as “agenda-driven far-left elites” obsessed with using “secretive backroom deals and transfers” to hide their agenda from the public. To shine a light on these organizations, the Vitter report details annual budget numbers and board membership lists scrubbed from annual tax forms that these nonprofits, like any nonprofit, are required to publish.

Though the report scolds the nonprofits as untrustworthy and elitist, there’s virtually no information in the report that details anything they have done wrong. Rather, Vitter and his staff appear to disagree with the shared policy goals of these nonprofits, which include combatting global warming as well as reducing cancer-causing pollutants from the air and water.

If there is a conspiracy afoot, as alluded to in “Chain of Environmental Command,” perhaps Vitter himself is involved.

In 2009, Vitter co-sponsored the Lung Cancer Mortality Reduction Act, legislation to require several federal agencies to work together on a comprehensive plan for reducing lung cancer mortality. The American Lung Association, one of the groups targeted by the Vitter report as a purveyor of “bogus propaganda,” helped pass the legislation, which was signed into law last year.

Or what about the RESTORE Act, which funds coastal restoration and economic recovery projects along the Gulf Coast using fines generated from the 2010 BP oil spill? The legislation was supported by the Environmental Defense Fund, the Nature Conservancy, the National Audubon Society and the National Wildlife Federation. All four groups were named in Vitter’s report as members of the pernicious “Club of Billionaires.” Vitter regularly boasts that he was a champion of this environmental group-backed legislation, which was signed into law in 2012.

A request to comment from Vitter’s office was not returned.

The change in tone from Vitter corresponds closely to his new perch as the top Republican on the Environment and Public Works Committee, a position he secured last year. Since 2013, Vitter has positioned himself as a close ally of the fossil fuel industry, attempting to block the confirmation of the Environmental Protection Agency administrator and going so far as to proclaim, “God bless the Koch brothers.”

Fossil fuel companies have leaned on congressional Republicans to block new environmental regulations. But with little influence within the Obama administration and without control of the Senate, lawmakers close to the industry have lashed out at public health advocates and scientists. Just as Vitter is now targeting NGOs, the GOP on the House Science Committee has begun subpoenaing scientists that have researched air pollutants, a move widely condemned by observers.

This post was originally published at RepublicReport.org

In a move that smacks off censorship, Republic Report has discovered that a telecom industry-affiliated lobbying group successfully persuaded an African-American news website to remove an article that reported critically on the groups advocating against net neutrality. The order to delete the article came from the website’s parent company, a business partner to Comcast.

Last Friday, I reported on how several civil rights groups, almost all with funding from Comcast, Verizon and other Internet service providers, recently wrote to the Federal Communication Commission in support of Chairman Tom Wheeler’s plan, which would create Internet fast lanes and slow lanes, an effective death of net neutrality. That piece was syndicated with Salon and The Nation, and several outlets aggregated the article. For a short period, NewsOne, a news site geared towards the African-American community, posted the piece along with its own commentary.

Then, the NewsOne article with my reporting disappeared.

If you Google the term ‘MMTC NewsOne,’ the NewsOne article (“Civil Rights Groups Blocking Efforts To Keep Internet Fair?”) still appears in the result list, though if you click it, it’s been deleted from the web. Luckily, the Internet cache still has a copy.

According to discussions with several people at NewsOne, including an editor there, the decision to take down the article came from corporate headquarters. NewsOne editor Abena Agyeman-Fisher told Republic Report, “The company didn’t feel it was appropriate to have up and we were supposed to take it down.” NewsOne is owned by Radio One, a company with a 50.9 percent stake in a business partnership with Comcast, known as TV One.

NewsOne was also contacted by a lobbying group called the Minority Media and Telecommunications Council (MMTC), an organization that has gained infamy for frequently mobilizing black, Latino and Asian-American groups to advocate on behalf of telecom industry-friendly positions, including recent big media mergers. On Monday, according to an attendee at an MMTC conference, MMTC vice president Nicol Turner-Lee referred to my reporting as a “digital lynch mob.” Turner-Lee, who resigned her previous position at a nonprofit after allegations of financial impropriety, reportedly claimed that minority organizations that support Title II reclassification—the only path for effective net neutrality after a court ruling in January—are not “true civil rights leaders.”

Contacted by Republic Report, MMTC president David Honig confirmed that he reached out to NewsOne, and also stood by Turner-Lee’s comments from earlier this week. Asked about the “digital lynch mob” comment, Honig e-mailed us to say, “I stand with Dr. Turner Lee’s assessment of the various hit pieces written by you and others. She spoke in the vernacular of the movement to which she has devoted her life, and is referencing the divide and conquer tactics used for decades to undermine the civil rights movement.” Regarding the claim that no “true civil rights leaders” support reclassification, Honig replied, “she was correct. Not one of the leaders of the major national civil rights membership organizations has endorsed Title II reclassification.”

In fact, many civil rights groups and activists support reclassification and strong net neutrality protections. Reached by Republic Report, the organizations were livid about MMTC’s insults and the decision by NewsOne to retract its story.

“MMTC is not the arbiter of who is and who is not a true civil rights group,” says Jessica Gonzalez, vice president of the National Hispanic Media Coalition, which represents a broad coalition in support of net neutrality through reclassification. “For them to claim anyone who supports reclassification is not a true civil rights group is just laughable. We have gone to the mat for our community for decades.”

“It’s disturbing that an online news site would remove a story just because its owners and their allies might not like it,” said Joseph Torres of Free Press, the co-author of News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media. “This smacks of corporate censorship. A news organization shouldn’t be hiding the facts about the Net Neutrality debate because its corporate owners and their allies disagree with a journalist’s reporting. This is exactly why we need Net Neutrality. We don’t want to live in a world where Comcast or AT&T gets to decide which side of the story you see.”

Malkia Cyril, executive director of the Center for Media Justice, wrote to Republic Report to say, “I’m scared for our journalists, especially those that use the Internet to share their stories. When corporate or 20th century civil rights organizations silence the voices of journalists trying to simply report on the biggest first amendment issue of the 21st century, it only clarifies why we need strong rules that prevent censorship and discrimination on the Internet.” Cyril’s organization is a national organizing and training center for media rights that counts organizations such as Color of Change, Presente.org and others in its advocacy network.

NewsOne was not the only outlet lobbied by MMTC. The blog Field Negro was also contacted by MMTC’s David Honig, a longtime pro-telecom industry operative who told Field Negro that “no one disagrees about the desirability of an open Internet,” and argued that net neutrality activists are somehow equivalent to white liberals who support gentrification.

In reality, Honig has waged a multi-year war against efforts to build an open Internet, and the groups in his network continually shift the goal posts to ensure ISPs are allowed to discriminate based on content. For instance, one of the groups that has collaborated with Honig, the Japanese American Citizens League, told the FCC in 2010 that net neutrality would “do more harm than good” and that they “remain unconvinced that there is a need for this type of regulation.” Well, in Honig’s latest letter on behalf of the Japanese American Citizens League, net neutrality is needed, but only if adopted through FCC Chairman Wheeler’s terms, which is to say, with Internet fast lanes and slow lanes.

The arguments keep changing. The only thing that stays consistent is the money and the ISP-friendly policy. Comcast, a major opponent of net neutrality, is a big sponsor of both the MMTC (which has received around $350,000) and the Japanese American Citizens League. Honig’s board of advisors includes Joe Waz, an executive who has led Comcast’s policy outreach.

Asked about the MMTC-organized civil rights group letters against net neutrality and ensuing controversy, Professor Todd Gitlin called them the “closest thing I can imagine to a political quid pro quo,” explaining, “The evidence they offer on the proposition that minorities would benefit in employment, in access, in the rejection of reclassification is nil. It’s a lot of huffing and puffing built on the gullibility of the reader.”

He added, “the fact NewsOne saw fit to delete a report that they previously posted without any claim that anything was mistaken in the report tells you something about their commitment to open discourse.”

Jeff Cohen, an associate professor of journalism at Ithaca College, also commented on the NewsOne decision. “Just as corporate cash can corrupt civil rights groups, this incident shows how corporate power can corrupt and censor the news.”

Advocates for strong net neutrality argue that the rule is necessary so ISPs do not squelch out minority viewpoints with slower speeds. ISPs, on the other hand, say they can be trusted. If just the debate around net neutrality is any guide, large media corporations seem willing to suppress unfavorable news content. “If this happens now,” says Cayden Mak, the New Media Director of 18MillionRising.org, an Asian-American advocacy group, “imagine how difficult it will be to criticize internet providers and their allies without strong Net Neutrality rules.”

Update: Turner-Lee’s colleague e-mailed Republic Report to say that her resignation from the National Association for Multi-Ethnicity in Communications was unrelated to the charges, which she says were false and which NAMIC found to have no basis.

Last February, The Nation, with support from the Investigative Fund, published a broad look into the many failures of America’s lobbying disclosure system. Among several revelations in the piece, we reported that major aspects of lobbying law have gone completely unenforced. The Department of Justice, we found, has never brought an enforcement action against an individual or firm for failing to register under the Lobbying Disclosure Act. The only LDA enforcement actions to date have been from individuals who do register but fall behind in their paperwork. But for the thousands of influence peddlers in Washington, DC, who go about their trade without registration and disclosure, law enforcement has turned a blind eye.

That may be changing.

According to a story posted on Friday by The Hill, “the Office of Congressional Ethics has for the first time accused an entity of lobbying Congress illegally. The complaint has been referred to the Justice Department, which enforces the Lobbying Disclosure Act, but few other details are available.”

Notably, the first law firm to receive notice of this referral was Covington & Burling, Attorney General Eric Holder’s previous employer. Covington’s Robert Kelner wrote:

For several years, we have been warning clients and others that it was only a matter of time before we would see criminal referrals against lobbyists who fail to register under the federal Lobbying Disclosure Act (“LDA”). Until now, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia has focused exclusively—and rarely—on bringing cases against registered lobbyists who fail to timely file reports. This week, however, the Office of Congressional Ethics (“OCE”) of the U.S. House of Representatives mentioned in its quarterly report that during the second quarter of this year, “OCE voted to refer one entity to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia for failure to register under the Lobbying Disclosure Act.” This is big news.

It’s not clear yet which “shadow lobbyist” is being targeted for investigation. But just the fact that the DOJ is finally taking a look into this problem, which includes prominent members of both parties, is indeed big news.

This post was originally published at RepublicReport.org.

Among visitors to Freedom Fest, a libertarian convention in Las Vegas, you might miss the aging Don Blankenship amid other middle-aged attendees and a swarm of college students in three-piece suits. Blankenship, wearing a bowling shirt and tan slacks, moves from panel to panel carrying a tote bag filled with free schwag—of which there was a lot to choose from, including this “water bottle” from the Charles Koch Institute—like anyone else. The former CEO of Massey Energy became the most feared man in West Virginia for his ruthless control over his mines and for busting unions throughout Appalachia. Now, he might be the most hated, after a 2010 blast at his company’s Upper Big Branch mine killed twenty-nine workers in one of the worst mining disasters in American history.

Blankenship, who retired from Massey after the tragedy at UBB, is now a political activist, and he’s in Nevada for several reasons. For one thing, he was there to attend the Heartland Institute’s conference on global warming denial, which preceded Freedom Fest. And in any case, he now resides in Sin City for tax purposes.

It’s the first time Blankenship has attended either event, he tells me, but he’s eager to gather intellectual fodder for a movie he’s creating on the US economy. “I’m basically looking for information and fresh ideas,” Blankenship says. “We’re in a reg-cecession,” he explains, which is a term he created for “a recession caused by excessive regulation, including many based on global warming.”

At the height of his power, shortly before the blast, Blankenship was already a powerful political player and served on the board of the US Chamber of Commerce, arguably the most influential business lobbying group in the world. After the mine tragedy, the Chamber and other coal-connected political groups successfully defeated congressional efforts to update the laws governing mine safety. Republic Report obtained a financial disclosure form that shows that under Blankenship his coal company donated $100,000 to the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a libertarian think tank that penned an op-ed after the mine collapse to warn against letting the tragedy be used by “anti-mining activists” for new regulations.

“Most people excuse their lack of involvement in politics as politics being dirty and politics causing problems,” says Blankenship, “but the only way to have good government is to have better candidates and elect better people and it’s why we have $17 trillion in debt and an economy that’s declining.”

Blankenship concedes that he is not as active in the political realm as he used to be, though he still gives an occasional phone call to his former colleagues. “I’ve spoken to the US Chamber and I’ve spoken to the coal associations. You can not just immediately have your hand out to compromise, you’ve got to have belief and you have to stand up for what’s right, not what’s politically correct.”

After listening to Blankenship’s short diatribe against the Sierra Club and Greenpeace, I asked Blankenship what should be done about these environmental groups. “You’ve got to fight them at every step,” he replies. “The environmental movement isn’t a great cause, it’s a great business.”

To Blankenship, the EPA’s coal power plant regulations and the mine safety crowd all represent the same ideology. “The actual UBB explosion was partially the result of the war on coal,” he says.

A minute later, after mentioning that he is going to be late to meet his date for lunch, he makes the connection even more explicit. “UBB is just another example of how willing the far left is to outright lie and of course when I was CEO of Massey I was coached to say ‘untruthful,’ but really it’s a lie. The reason you know they will lie about the science of global warming is because they lied about the very science of UBB. Their willingness to lie about that solidifies in my mind their willingness to lie about the science of global warming.”

Over the last year, Blankenship has tried to clear his name over the UBB mine disaster. He created a short video and has told almost any reporter willing to listen that the disaster was a freak accident relating to the buildup of natural gas. Reports from workers and subsequent investigations have made clear that Massey Energy’s mines had skirted safety rules and were infamous for allowing a dangerous build-up of methane and other flammable gas. A study from the Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University showed that Massey’s corner-cutting had led to the worst safety record of any coal mining company for ten years prior to the disaster.

Blankenship continues to expound on his worldview. “Here’s where I get into answers that are very unpopular.” A wry grin creeps Blankenship’s otherwise expressionless face. “You’re basically seeing, well, I don’t want to use the word, but the way I describe fascism is the control of people’s lives by the combined efforts of big business and big government.” He rattles off several examples: GE’s getting sweetheart deals from the Obama administration, the bank bailouts, Warren Buffet. Publicly traded companies are increasingly making their money overseas, so they don’t have to comply with domestic regulations, Blankenship says. That’s why they support the Obama administration.

Before he has to go, he reminds me that his movie on regulation will come out on Labor Day. Its argument, he claims will even sell with union workers, who have been duped by their bosses into supporting anti-mining politicians like Obama and Joe Biden.

Who would better lead our country?

“I love Ted Cruz’s courage with the Obamacare filibuster,” he says. “I don’t like Rand Paul as much as father Ron Paul. Like what Rubio’s been saying. Ben Carson.” If he had his druthers, who would he pick for the White House? “I’d reincarnate Ronald Reagan.”

With that, he smiled for the second time in the conference, waddled into his seat and disappeared into a crowd of other libertarian activists.

This post was originally published at RepublicReport.org.

Last Friday, just before the Federal Communication Commission closed its comment period for its upcoming rule on “network neutrality,” a massive coalition of Asian, Latino and black civil rights groups filed letters arguing that regulators should lay off of Internet Service Providers regarding Title II reclassification and accept FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler’s original plan. In other words, something close to half of the entire civil rights establishment just sold out the Internet.

The civil rights groups letters argue that Title II reclassification of broadband services as a public utility—the only path forward for real net neutrality after a federal court ruling in January—would somehow “harm communities of color.” The groups wrote to the FCC to tell them that “we do not believe that the door to Title II should be opened.” Simply put, these groups, many of which claim to carry the mantle of Martin Luther King Jr., are saying that Comcast and Verizon should be able to create Internet slow lanes and fast lanes, and such a change would magically improve the lives of non-white Americans.

The filings reveal a who’s who of civil rights groups willing to shill on behalf of the telecom industry. One filing lists prominent civil rights groups NAACP, the League of United Latin American Citizens, the Urban League, the National Council on Black Civil Participation and the National Action Network. The other features the Council of Korean Americans, the Japanese American Citizens League, the National Black Farmers Association, the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, OCA, Asian Pacific American Advocates, the National Puerto Rican Chamber of Commerce, the Latino Coalition and many more.

Of course, the groups listed on these filings do not speak for all communities of color on telecom policy, and there are civil rights groups out there that actually support net neutrality, including Color of Change and Asian Americans Advancing Justice. Joseph Torres with Free Press told Vice that communities of color believe a free and open Internet is essential in the digital age, especially when most non-whites do not own radio stations, broadcast outlets or other forms of mass media. “Protecting real net neutrality is critical for people of color because an open Internet gives us the opportunity to speak for ourselves without having to ask corporate gatekeepers for permission,” Torres says.

A number of K Street consultants have helped make this epic sell-out possible.

The Minority Media and Telecommunications Council (MMTC) coordinated many of the participants in the anti–net neutrality filings sent to the FCC last week. Last year, the Center for Public Integrity published an investigation of MMTC, showing that the group has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars from Verizon, Comcast, the National Cable and Telecommunications Association and other telecom sources while reliably peddling the pro-telecom industry positions. For instance, the group attacked the Obama administration’s first attempt at net neutrality, while celebrating the proposed (and eventually successful) merger between Comcast and NBC.

Martin Chavez, the former mayor of Albuquerque, now works with a group called the Hispanic Technology and Telecommunications Partnership (HTTP) to corral Latino civil rights groups into opposing net neutrality. Last month, Chavez hosted a net neutrality event on Capitol Hill to call on legislators to oppose Title II reclassification. As Time recently reported, Chavez is on the staff of one of Verizon’s lobbying firms, the Ibarra Strategy Group.

“HTTP is nothing more than an industry front-group that is at best misinformed and at worst intentionally distorting facts as it actively opposes efforts to better serve the communications needs of Latinos,” says Alex Nogales of the National Hispanic Media Coalition, which strongly supports net neutrality. His group has filed its own letter to the FCC.

Still, telecom cash has become a vital source of funding for cash-starved nonprofits. OCA, the Asian-American civil rights nonprofit formerly known as the Organization of Chinese Americans, counts Comcast as a major donor and sponsor for its events and galas. Not only did OCA go on to sign the anti–net neutrality letter last Friday, the group wrote a similar filing to the FCC in 2010, claiming absurdly that Asian-American entrepreneurs would benefit from having ISPs able to discriminate based on content. Similarly, League of United Latin American Citizens, better known simply as LULAC, has been a dependable ally of the telecom industry while partnering with Comcast for a $5 million civic engagement campaign. Here’s a picture of LULAC proudly accepting a jumbo-sized check from AT&T.

As Vice first reported, telecoms are desperate for third-party approval, and have even resorted to fabricating community support for their anti–net neutrality lobbying campaign.

Perhaps the bigger picture here is how so many of the old civil rights establishments have become comfortable with trading endorsements for cash. Verizon, Comcast, AT&T and other telecom companies have donated, either directly or through a company foundation, to nearly every group listed on the anti–net neutrality letters filed last week. We saw a similar dynamic play out with Walmart when the retailer handed out cash to civil rights groups in order to buy support for opening stores in urban areas.

Times have changed. Just as Martin Luther King Jr.’s children have embarrassingly descended into fighting bitterly over what’s left of his estate, the civil rights groups formed to advance Dr. King’s legacy seem willing to sell out their own members for a buck.

This story was reported in partnership with The Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute.

Patrick Kennedy, son of the late Senator Ted Kennedy, did several stints in rehab after crashing his car into a barricade on Capitol Hill in 2006, a headline-making event that revealed the then–US congressman for Rhode Island had been abusing prescription drugs, including the painkiller OxyContin. Kennedy went on to make mental health—including substance abuse—a cornerstone of his political agenda, and he is reportedly at work on a memoir about his struggles with addiction and mental illness. In 2013, he also helped found an advocacy group, Project SAM (Smart Approaches to Marijuana), which has barnstormed the country opposing the growing state and federal efforts to legalize pot.

Taking the stage to rousing applause last February, Kennedy joined more than 2,000 opponents of marijuana legalization a few miles south of Washington, DC, at the annual convention of the Community Anti-Drug Coalition of America (CADCA), one of the largest such organizations in the country.

“Let me tell you, there is nothing more inconsistent with trying to improve mental health and reduce substance-abuse disorders in this country than to legalize a third drug,” Kennedy boomed. The former congressman also praised his fellow speakers for standing up to the “extremist responses” from legalization advocates.

Given that CADCA is dedicated to protecting society from dangerous drugs, the event that day had a curious sponsor: Purdue Pharma, the manufacturer of Oxy-Contin, the highly addictive painkiller that nearly ruined Kennedy’s congressional career and has been linked to thousands of overdose deaths nationwide.

Prescription opioids, a line of pain-relieving medications derived from the opium poppy or produced synthetically, are the most dangerous drugs abused in America, with more than 16,000 deaths annually linked to opioid addiction and overdose. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that more Americans now die from painkillers than from heroin and cocaine combined. The recent uptick in heroin use around the country has been closely linked to the availability of prescription opioids, which give their users a similar high and can trigger a heroin craving in recovering addicts. (Notably, there are no known deaths related to marijuana, although there have been instances of impaired driving.)

People in the United States, a country in which painkillers are routinely overprescribed, now consume more than 84 percent of the entire worldwide supply of oxycodone and almost 100 percent of hydrocodone opioids. In Kentucky, to take just one example, about one in fourteen people is misusing prescription painkillers, and nearly 1,000 Kentucky residents are dying every year.

So it’s more than a little odd that CADCA and the other groups leading the fight against relaxing marijuana laws, including the Partnership for Drug-Free Kids (formerly the Partnership for a Drug-Free America), derive a significant portion of their budget from opioid manufacturers and other pharmaceutical companies. According to critics, this funding has shaped the organization’s policy goals: CADCA takes a softer approach toward prescription-drug abuse, limiting its advocacy to a call for more educational programs, and has failed to join the efforts to change prescription guidelines in order to curb abuse. In contrast, CADCA and the Partnership for Drug-Free Kids have adopted a hard-line approach to marijuana, opposing even limited legalization and supporting increased police powers.

A close look at the broader political coalition lobbying against marijuana-law reform reveals many such conflicts of interest. In fact, the CADCA event was attended by representatives of a familiar confederation of anti-pot interests, many of whom have a financial stake in the status quo, including law enforcement agencies, pharmaceutical firms, and nonprofits funded by federal drug-prevention grants.

The anti-pot lobby’s efforts run counter to a nationwide tide of liberalization when it comes to marijuana law. In 2012, voters legalized pot in Colorado and Washington State; this year, voters in Alaska appear poised to do likewise. Since 1996, twenty-two states and the District of Columbia have legalized medical marijuana or effectively decriminalized it, and a contentious ballot initiative in Florida may result in the South’s first medical marijuana law. Meanwhile, legislatures across the country are debating a variety of bills that would continue to ease marijuana restrictions or penalties. On the federal level, a bipartisan coalition of lawmakers has challenged the Drug Enforcement Administration in testy hearings, and many have called for removing marijuana as a Schedule I drug under the Controlled Substances Act, which puts it in the same class as heroin and LSD.

The opponents of marijuana-law reform argue that such measures pose significant dangers, from increased crime and juvenile delinquency to addiction and death. But legalization’s biggest threat is to the bottom line of these same special interests, which reap significant monetary advantages from pot prohibition that are rarely acknowledged in the public debate.

* * *

The CADCA convention featured a roster of federal officials and members of Congress as well as a guest appearance by R&B singer Mario. The speakers talked with energy about the coming showdown over marijuana-law reform.

“We need to apply what Hank Aaron said about baseball to our movement today,” asserted Sue Thau, a CADCA consultant. “We need to always keep swinging!”

Buses were scheduled to ferry the participants to Congress for meetings, and Thau coached the assembled activists to emphasize the potential risks for young people, something that “everybody on Capitol Hill can agree on.” In addition to lobbying against marijuana-law reform, she encouraged everyone to preserve key federal funding streams, to “make sure all the programs that fund our field, every one of them,” are protected in the appropriations process for the coming fiscal year.

Ironically, both CADCA and the Partnership for Drug-Free Kids are heavily reliant on a combination of federal drug-prevention education grants and funding from pharmaceutical companies. Founded in 1992, CADCA has lobbied aggressively for a range of federal grants for groups dedicated to the “war on drugs.” The Drug-Free Communities Act of 1997, a program directed by the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, was created through CADCA’s advocacy. That law now allocates over $90 million a year to community organizations dedicated to reducing drug abuse. Records show that CADCA has received more than $2.5 million in annual federal funding in recent years. The former Partnership for a Drug-Free America, founded in 1985 and best known for its dramatic “This is your brain on drugs” public service announcements, has received similarly hefty taxpayer support while advocating for increased anti-drug grant programs.

The Nation obtained a confidential financial disclosure from the Partnership for Drug-Free Kids showing that the group’s largest donors include Purdue Pharma, the manufacturer of OxyContin, and Abbott Laboratories, maker of the opioid Vicodin. CADCA also counts Purdue Pharma as a major supporter, as well as Alkermes, the maker of a powerful and extremely controversial new painkiller called Zohydrol. The drug, which was released to the public in March, has sparked a nationwide protest, since Zohydrol is reportedly ten times stronger than OxyContin. Janssen Pharmaceutical, a Johnson & Johnson subsidiary that produces the painkiller Nucynta, and Pfizer, which manufactures several opioid products, are also CADCA sponsors. For corporate donors, CADCA offers a raft of partnership opportunities, including authorized use of the “CADCA logo for your company’s marketing, website, and advertising materials, etc.”

The groups’ approach to marijuana contrasts sharply with their attitude toward prescription-drug abuse. In March of this year, the heads of CADCA and the Partnership for Drug-Free Kids sent a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder and other government officials urging them to keep marijuana listed as Schedule I, a designation indicating that it has no recognized medical use and is among society’s most dangerous drugs. “We are aware of a small chorus in the United States Congress (copied on this letter) who are calling for the rescheduling of marijuana,” wrote Arthur Dean, a retired general and the president of CADCA, and Stephen Pasierb, head of the Partnership. “[O]ur groups agree with the most recent Health and Human Services (HHS) determination that marijuana should remain a Schedule I drug.”

* * *

CADCA’s website makes it clear that the organization—dedicated to a “world of safe, healthy and drug-free communities”—has adopted marijuana as its primary concern. The group’s stated policy priorities are to preserve and expand two federal drug-prevention grant programs and to oppose marijuana-law reform. CADCA has hosted training seminars to instruct community organizations in the best tactics for opposing efforts to legalize even medical marijuana. The group also offers template letters to the editor, sample opinion columns, talking points and other tips for pushing back against reform efforts.

Prescription drugs are another story. In this realm, both CADCA and the Partnership favor educational campaigns and limited pill-monitoring programs—measures that experts on painkiller addiction say are insufficient to deal with the burgeoning problem. CADCA’s site mentions prescription-drug abuse primarily in the context of expanding outreach programs funded through the Drug-Free Communities Act.

In February, the same month that CADCA held its convention, forty-two leading drug-prevention groups sent a letter to the Food and Drug Administration to protest the recent approval of Zohydro. Notably absent from the signatories: CADCA and the Partnership for Drug-Free Kids. A policy paper posted by CADCA regarding prescription drugs doesn’t call for a shift in how the FDA regulates painkillers, arguing instead that federal drug-prevention grant programs should be expanded.

Asked about CADCA’s efforts to combat prescription-drug abuse, Thau replied that the group supports educational programs and drug-monitoring efforts, and also recently signed on to a bill—sponsored by Senator Ed Markey—that offers a civil-liability exemption to those who provide preventative medications to individuals experiencing an overdose. CADCA has also promoted voluntary drug “take-back” events that encourage people to bring their unused pharmaceuticals to a central location for disposal.

It’s important to keep in mind, however, that industry groups haven’t opposed any of these measures. But they do oppose those restrictions that could eat into the industry’s profits. In 2012, for example, a group of doctors and drug-prevention advocates petitioned the Food and Drug Administration to change the prescription labeling of opioids so that they could be prescribed only for “severe pain,” rather than the “moderate to severe pain” stipulated under the current guidelines. Purdue Pharma opposed the plan, calling on the FDA to “maintain that the current indications for long-acting opioids are appropriate.” According to advocates who spoke to The Nation on condition of anonymity, the Partnership refused to join the push for new prescription guidelines. CADCA didn’t sign on either.

CADCA and the Partnership have also failed to call for action on current bills in Congress to crack down aggressively on painkillers, including the Stop Oxy Abuse Act, which would—in keeping with the suggestion of the doctors’ advocates who petitioned the FDA—allow OxyContin to be prescribed only for severe pain. The two anti-drug groups have not signed on to support the Safe Prescribing Act, which would move hydrocodone products like Vicodin and Lortab from Schedule III to Schedule II, making the product more difficult to prescribe. Nor, for that matter, have they endorsed any of the bills introduced by Representative Hal Rogers or Senator Joe Manchin to block the approval of new, stronger pain-killer drugs such as Zohydro.

“I think it’s hypocritical to remain silent with regard to the scheduling of hydrocodone products, while investing energy in maintaining marijuana as a Schedule I drug,” says Dr. Andrew Kolodny, a New York psychiatrist who heads Physicians for Responsible Opioid Prescribing. Kolodny notes that there are legitimate concerns regarding marijuana legalization, particularly how the drug may be marketed and its effect on adolescents, so “I don’t think it’s inappropriate for them to be advocating on marijuana.

“But,” he adds, “when we have a severe epidemic in America—one the CDC says is the worst drug epidemic in US history—it makes you wonder whether or not they’ve been influenced by their funding.”

In some cases, both CADCA and the Partnership have directly promoted certain opioids. In 2010, Marcia Lee Taylor, the Partnership’s chief lobbyist, signed on to a letter with Will Rowe of the American Pain Foundation asking the Office of National Drug Control Policy to continue Medicaid reimbursements for so-called “tamper-proof” opioids, which cannot be crushed or snorted but can still be abused to deadly effect. (The American Pain Foundation has since shut down, following an investigation by ProPublica showing that the group relied heavily on money from opioid manufacturers and played “down the risks associated with…painkillers while exaggerating the benefits.”) In 2012, CADCA joined with Purdue Pharma and other opioid makers in signing a similar letter to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

Prescription-drug manufacturers like Purdue Pharma, which made more than $27 billion in revenues from OxyContin alone since 1996, have faced ethical problems in the past. In 2007, Purdue Pharma and its top executives paid $634.5 million in fines for deceptive marketing that played down the addictive properties of OxyContin. Also that same year, the company agreed to pay $19.5 million to twenty-six states and the District of Columbia to settle claims that it illegally encouraged doctors to overprescribe the drug. But the company’s influence over anti-drug advocacy is less known.

Erik Altieri, a spokesman for the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, argues that marijuana can provide a “great alternative for treating chronic pain and other types of ailments.” Pharmaceutical companies “don’t want to see another vendor on the market.”

In a written response to queries, retired general Arthur Dean, CADCA’s chair and CEO, said: “The funding CADCA receives in no way impacts CADCA’s policy efforts or strategic direction. Prescription drugs are legal medicines that serve a legitimate and often life-saving purpose in our society. CADCA has utilized some discretionary grants from industry sources, such as Purdue Pharma and several other companies, to develop programs and tools to help community coalitions prevent and reduce youth prescription drug abuse and the abuse of over-the-counter cough medicine.” Asked about current proposals in Congress to rein in the way painkillers are prescribed, Dean replied: “CADCA has not taken a position on the proposed legislations.”

The Partnership for Drug-Free Kids did not respond to a request for comment. Neither did Purdue Pharma and other opioid makers, including Abbott Laboratories, Pfizer and Alkermes. A spokesperson with Janssen told The Nation that the company funds CADCA to support “educational programs about the safe and responsible use of pain medicines.”

In May, CADCA sent out an action alert to its members, asking them to contact Congress and oppose an amendment in the House of Representatives that would block the DEA from targeting medical marijuana operations that are legal under state law. The measure passed later that month with bipartisan support.

* * *

Patrick Kennedy’s Project Sam is arguably the most visible group opposing marijuana-law reform, with the former congressman making the rounds on HBO’s Real Time With Bill Maher and Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report, among other cable and news programs. And yet this group, too, is rife with potential conflicts of interest.

Some legalization advocates have criticized Kennedy’s crusade against pot. Though the former congressman received many second chances in his struggle with alcohol and prescription drugs, he has opposed any move toward marijuana decriminalization that would afford similar leniency to others. After Project SAM began organizing opposition to Alaska’s legalization initiative this year, demonstrators in Anchorage paraded a giant check with the figure $9,015—the amount in campaign money that Kennedy received from the liquor and beer lobby while in office. Critics have also pointed out that Project SAM’s board and partners represent many of the interest groups that stand to profit from marijuana’s continued prohibition.

“Some of the folks active with Project SAM appear to have a financial interest in keeping marijuana illegal and promoting mandatory treatment for adult consumers,” says Mason Tvert, spokesman for the Marijuana Policy Project in Colorado. For example, Ben Cort, Project SAM’s spokesman, leads a drug-treatment program in Aurora, Colorado.

Tvert points out that marijuana convictions often result in court-ordered rehab, which can provide an obvious incentive for treatment centers to oppose reform. In filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Geo Group—a company that manages several for-profit treatment and detention centers—states that “any changes with respect to the decriminalization of drugs and controlled substances could affect the number of persons arrested, convicted, sentenced and incarcerated, thereby potentially reducing demand for correctional facilities to house them.” In short, marijuana-law reform can cut into revenues.

Dr. Stuart Gitlow, president of the American Society of Addiction Medicine, sits on Project SAM’s board of directors and frequently speaks out against medical marijuana. In comments to USA Today in January, Gitlow disputed President Obama’s comment that marijuana is no more dangerous than alcohol. “There’s no benefit to marijuana,” he said. “It’s simply that people want the freedom to be stoned. That’s all it is. And there’s a great deal of risk.”

What the USA Today piece didn’t mention—and what Gitlow hasn’t disclosed during his appearances on HLN TV, Southern California Public Radio and other local media—is that he serves as the medical director for Orexo, a pharmaceutical company that recently produced a new drug called Zubsolv. The product is an opioid substitute along the lines of Suboxone that, while designed to treat opioid addiction, is often abused for recreational purposes. As The New York Times reported, Suboxone has been linked to more than 400 deaths in the United States since 2003.

Last December, Dr. Mark Willenbring, former director of treatment and recovery research at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, raised concerns about Gitlow’s leadership of the American Society of Addiction Medicine, given his relationship with Orexo. “My concern is with the increasing public perception, especially in psychiatry and addiction treatment, that financial interests taint and discredit professional opinions,” Willenbring told the Alcoholism & Drug Abuse Weekly.

Peter Bensinger, a former DEA administrator, and Robert DuPont, a former White House drug czar, now manage a consulting firm that specializes in workplace drug testing. The two work closely with Project SAM and have spoken at events with its leaders. Last year, for example, Bensinger and DuPont signed on to a Project SAM letter pressing the Justice Department to reconsider its decision to defer the enforcement of federal drug laws in states that have legalized marijuana. For that stance, they’ve come under fire from marijuana-law reformers like Howard Wooldridge of Citizens Opposing Prohibition for promoting “policies that line their pocketbook.”

* * *

Marijuana-law reform has created deep divisions within police agencies. A recent poll of officers found that nearly two-thirds believed marijuana laws should be reformed—with 36 percent agreeing that marijuana should be legalized, regulated and taxed; 14 percent supporting relaxed penalties; 11 percent supporting legalized medical marijuana; and 4 percent supporting decriminalization.

Yet strong institutional forces have kept nearly every law enforcement professional association opposed to reform. Starting with the Reagan administration, police departments were encouraged to seize and sell property associated with drug busts, which significantly augmented their revenue. Between 2002 and 2012, law enforcement agencies collected about $1 billion from marijuana arrests, according to Justice Department data.

It was also during the 1980s that federal grant programs requiring police to engage in drug enforcement were expanded, including the Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Program, which funds multijurisdictional drug task forces. The Byrne grants, which cover a range of drug enforcement actions including marijuana, provided over $2.4 billion for law enforcement agencies this fiscal year.

“It’s money,” says retired Los Angeles Police Department Deputy Chief Stephen Downing, when asked why so many police organizations are lobbying against marijuana-law reform. “In many states, the city government expects police to make seizures, and they expect these seizures to supplement their budgets.” According to The Wall Street Journal, drug task forces in Washington State have predicted that asset-forfeiture revenues will decrease as a result of marijuana legalization.

Others dispute the notion. Bob Cooke, a former president of the California Narcotic Officers’ Association, asserts that “losing money from asset forfeiture is not why we believe [pot] should be regulated.” Instead, he argues, law enforcement agencies oppose legalizing marijuana because its use is inherently dangerous: “One try and it can ruin your life.”

But the fiscal impact on law enforcement has become part of the debate. Earlier this year, when Minnesota State Representative Carly Melin proposed a medical marijuana bill, she faced a backlash from police lobbyists. “There was a concern about losing federal grants tied to drug enforcement laws,” Melin says. “Asset forfeiture was briefly discussed as well.” She adds that law enforcement agencies approached her bill with “absolute opposition” but changed their position after widespread public pressure. Melin’s bill passed in May once patients and the parents of sick children began contacting lawmakers.

“It’s not hard to figure out that there’s a lot of money attached to enforcing marijuana laws,” Melin says. “Marijuana arrests still account for over 60 percent of drug arrests in Minnesota, so it’s still big business for law enforcement.” Minnesota’s numbers reflect the data compiled by the American Civil Liberties Union, which show that marijuana arrests account for more than half of all drug arrests nationwide.

Similar dynamics have played out elsewhere. When Californians debated a legalization initiative in 2010—which was ultimately unsuccessful—the lead organizer of the opposition was John Lovell, a longtime police lobbyist in Sacramento. Lovell has made a career of channeling federal “drug war” grants to law enforcement agencies in the state—including millions of dollars for the California Marijuana Suppression Program, grants for overtime pay for police, and money for additional officers dedicated to marijuana eradication.

In Florida, the state sheriffs’ association, led by Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd, has become the public face of opposition to a medical marijuana referendum on the ballot this fall. Judd has deployed a number of arguments against the referendum, from the dangers of driving while high to increased workers’ compensation claims, to teenage addiction and increased respiratory illnesses.

But the annual strategic plan submitted to the Polk County Board of Commissioners by Judd’s office suggests another major concern. In it, Judd says that his force is “doing more with fewer resources” and that he’s had to cut seventeen deputy sheriff positions due to a lack of funds. Judd describes seizures from marijuana grow houses as a key revenue source for his department: seizing such property helps to “meet eligible equipment or other non-recurring needs that could not be met by local funding, thereby putting forfeited and unclaimed funds to work in crime prevention, for the taxpayer,” according to the document. Plus a Florida law enforcement newsletter describes the state’s marijuana eradication program—which brought in nearly $900,000 last year in forfeitures, and more than $1 million in previous years—as “an excellent return on investment.”

Downing, the retired LAPD deputy chief, notes: “The only difference now compared to the times of alcohol prohibition is that, in the times of alcohol prohibition, law enforcement—the police and judges—got their money in brown paper bags. Today, they get their money through legitimate, systematic programs run by the federal government. That’s why they’re using their lobbying organizations to fight every reform.”

Indeed, alcohol prohibition was ended partly through ethics reform. During Prohibition, the Eighteenth Amendment was enforced through a law called the Volstead Act, which exempted federal liquor enforcement agents from Progressive-era civil service exams. Without these exams, the Prohibition Unit became a vehicle for awarding patronage jobs to political allies. Almost immediately, these 18,000 federal jobs were marked by scandal and corruption. According to one Treasury agent, the “most extraordinary collection of political hacks, hangers-on, and passing highwaymen got appointed as prohibition agents.” They set up illegal roadblocks, killed innocent civilians, and extorted money from bootleggers rather than arresting them. The wet lobby successfully pushed to re-establish civil service exams for the Prohibition Unit in the late 1920s—a shift that embarrassed dry-lobby supporters, because nearly two-thirds of all agents couldn’t pass the entrance exam. Further weakening support for Prohibition, the Supreme Court declared it illegal in 1927 for local judges to pay themselves with a share of the fines collected from Volstead Act cases.

While not a perfect analogy, some marijuana advocates see the fight against Prohibition as a guide, since so many interest groups working to maintain the status quo today are tied to cash flows—whether federal grants or forfeiture revenues—that depend on keeping the drug illegal.

Prohibition provides “an incentive for these interest groups to keep seeking federal money to continue the ‘war on drugs’ [and] their own salaries,” says Representative Steve Cohen, one of the most outspoken proponents of legalization in Congress. Cohen adds that some of the most vociferous opponents of reform appear to be influenced by the money flowing from pot prohibition. “It’s a vicious cycle.”

This post was originally published at RepublicReport.org

Eric Cantor’s surprise defeat in the Republican primary, and subsequent decision to step down as majority leader, has set off a scramble within his party. The current whip, Representative Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), is widely perceived as the next majority leader, while Representative Peter Roskam (R-IL), Marlin Stutzman (R-IN) and Steve Scalise (R-LA) are rounding up votes to take McCarthy’s place as whip.

Though there are negligible policy differences between the candidates, particularly on energy issues, one candidate is particularly close to the fossil fuel lobby: Steve Scalise, the chairman of the Republican Study Committee, a caucus of likeminded conservative members, who represents an area of the Gulf Coast with a large concentration of offshore oil jobs.

A number of former Scalise staffers are now employed as lobbyists for the fossil fuel industry. Megan Bel, Scalise’s former legislative director, now works for the National Ocean Industries Association, a trade group for offshore oil drilling companies. Stephen Bell, Scalise’s longtime spokesperson, joined the National Rural Electric Cooperatives Association—a group that represents largely coal-fire power plants and has lobbied aggressively against the EPA’s new carbon rules—in April.

Scalise has cultivated political support from Koch Industries, the American Petroleum Institute, and Halliburton as part of the Republican Study Committee’s business outreach effort, according to a report in Politico. Notably, a Republican Study Committee outreach meeting with lobbyists occurred in the office of Shockey Scofield Solutions, Koch’s lobbying firm registered to defeat new carbon tax proposals.

Politico Influence also reports that Scalise counts several lobbyists among his inner circle. Jim McCrery, who held the same Louisiana district seat in Congress before retiring, is close to Scalise and now represents Koch Industries and Hess Corporation, among other clients. Rhod Shaw, another lobbyist reportedly close to Scalise, works at a firm that represents nearly a dozen fossil fuel interests, including BP, the coal-dependent utility company Duke Energy, and Murphy Oil.

Will the fossil fuel lobby leverage its considerable pull within the House GOP to ensure Scalise has enough votes to become House majority whip? The Wall Street Journal reports that McCarthy dropped previous support for wind energy tax credits as he moved to run for majority leader—a move perceived as a bid to build support among oil and coal interest groups.

Leadership elections, which are conducted by a secret ballot, are scheduled for June 19.

This post was originally published at RepublicReport.org

“All of the investment banks, up in New York and DC, they should have gone to jail.”

That isn’t a quote from an Occupy Wall Street protester or Senator Elizabeth Warren. That’s a common campaign slogan repeated by Dave Brat, the Virginia college professor who scored one of the biggest political upsets in over a century by defeating majority leader Eric Cantor in the Republican primary last night.

The national media is buzzing about Brat’s victory, but for all of the wrong reasons.

Did the Tea Party swoop in and help Brat, as many in the Democratic Party are suggesting? Actually, The Wall Street Journal reports no major Tea Party or anti-establishment GOP group spent funds to defeat Cantor. Did Cantor, the only Jewish Republican in Congress, lose because of his religion, as some have suggested? There’s no evidence so far of anti-Semitism during the campaign. Was Cantor caught flatfooted? Nope; Cantor’s campaign spent close to $1 million on the race and several outside advocacy groups, including the National Rifle Association, the National Realtors Association and the American Chemistry Council (a chemical industry lobbying association) came in and poured money into the district to defeat Brat. The New York Times claims that Brat focused his campaign primarily on immigration reform. Brat certainly made immigration a visible topic in his race, but Republic Report listened to several hours of Brat stump speeches and radio appearances, and that issue came up far than less what Brat called the main problem in government: corruption and cronyism.

Brat told Internet radio host Flint Engelman that the “number- one plank” in his campaign is “free markets.” Brat went on to explain, “Eric Cantor and the Republican leadership do not know what a free market is at all, and the clearest evidence of that is the financial crisis … When I say free markets, I mean no favoritism to K Street lobbyists.” Banks like Goldman Sachs were not fined for their role in the financial crisis—rather, they were rewarded with bailouts, Brat has said.

Brat, who has identified with maverick GOP lawmakers like Representative Justin Amash of Michigan, spent much of the campaign slamming both parties for being in the pocket of “Wall Street crooks” and DC insiders. The folks who caused the financial crisis, Brat says, “went onto Obama’s rolodex, the Republican leadership, Eric’s rolodex.”

During several campaign appearances, Brat says what upset him the most about Cantor was his role in gutting the last attempt at congressional ethics reform. “If you want to find out the smoking gun in this campaign,” Brat told Engelman, “just go Google and type the STOCK Act and CNN and Eric Cantor.” (On Twitter, Brat has praised the conservative author Peter Schweizer, whose work on congressional corruption forced lawmakers into action on the STOCK Act.)

The STOCK Act, a bill to crack down on insider trading, was significantly watered down by Cantor in early 2012. The lawmaker took out provisions that would have forced Wall Street “political intelligence” firms to register as traditional lobbyists would, and removed a section of the bill to empower prosecutors to go after public officials who illegally trade on insider knowledge. And Brat may be right to charge that Cantor’s moves on the STOCK Act were motivated by self-interest. Cantor played a leading role in blocking legislation to fix the foreclosure crisis while his wife and his stock portfolio were deeply invested in mortgage banks.

Most self-described Tea Party Republicans, including Rand Paul and Ted Cruz, have railed against Washington in a general sense without calling out the powerful—often Republican-leaning—groups that wield the most power.

Not Brat.

“Eric is running on Chamber of Commerce and Business Roundtable principles,” Brat told a town hall audience, later clarifying that he meant the US Chamber of Commerce, the largest lobbying trade group in the country. He also called out the American Chemistry Council for funding ads in his race with Cantor, telling a radio host that his opponent had asked his “crony capitalist friends to run more ads.” Brat repeats his mantra: “I’m not against business. I’m against big business in bed with big government.”

Indeed, Cantor has been a close ally to top lobbyists and the financial industry. “Many lobbyists on K Street whose clients include major financial institutions consider Cantor a go-to member in leadership on policy debates, including overhauling the mortgage finance market, extending the government backstop for terrorism insurance, how Wall Street should be taxed and flood insurance,” noted Politico following Cantor’s loss last night. In 2011, Cantor was caught on video promising a group of commodity speculators that he would roll back regulations on their industry.

There are many lessons to be learned from the Cantor-Brat race. For one, it’s worth reflecting on the fact that not only did Cantor easily out raise and outspend Brat by over $5 million to around $200,000 in campaign funds, but burned through a significant amount on lavish travel and entertainment instead of election advocacy. Federal Election Commission records show Cantor’s PAC spent at least $168,637 on steakhouses, $116,668 on luxury hotels (including a $17,903 charge to the Beverly Hills Hotel & Bungalows) and nearly a quarter-million on airfare (with about $140,000 in chartered flights)—just in the last year and a half!

But on the policy issues and political ramifications of this race, it’s not easy to box Brat into a neat caricature of an anti-immigration zealot or Tea Party demagogue, or, in Time’s hasty reporting, a “shopworn conservative boilerplate.” If Brat ascends to Congress, which is quite likely given the Republican-leaning district that he’ll run in as the GOP nominee, he may actually continue taking on powerful elites in Washington.

This post was originally published at RepublicReport.org

Note: An earlier version of this article contained factual errors that have since been corrected — see below.

Out of a crowded field of candidates hoping to replace retiring Representative Henry Waxman in Los Angeles, Democrat Matt Miller has attempted to distinguish himself by touting a variety of experiences. Miller’s campaign advertisement lists his various positions as a radio show host, education expert, former Clinton administration official, and business adviser. As he announced his candidacy, Miller took a leave from The Washington Post and NBC, where he was a columnist and contributor. What hasn’t been reported is his other breadwinning job: PR consultant.

Ethics forms filed by Miller to the House Clerk’s office, a standard procedure for any candidate for Congress, reveal that Miller received $239,099 from Burson-Marsteller, the influence and public relations firm, in 2013.

The ethics forms show a laundry list of other corporate clients, including American Express, General Electric, Linder & Associates, RLM Finsbury and Walmart. The New York Times’s Mark Leibovich, in his write-up of the race, described Miller as a former consultant to McKinsey & Company. The ethics forms show that Miller continued to receive a salary at the firm up until announcing his run: $295,927 in 2013 and 2014, and $318,721 in the previous year, 2012. Many of Miller’s clients continued to pay him up until he announced his candidacy, including RLM Finsbury, which bills itself as a public affairs firm that helps influence lawmakers and regulators. RLM Finsbury says Miller left the firm as he launched his campaign.

For an insider with deep ties to the lobbying community, it may seem surprising that the Los Angeles Times, in endorsing Miller, counted him as outside the flock of candidates who are “embedded members of the system.”

The many corporate consultancy gigs held by Miller may cast his policy and pundit positions into question. For instance, when Miller penned a column for the Post defending corporations that take full advantage of the tax code to dodge paying billions in corporate income taxes, he did not disclose at the time that he was being paid by GE, a company that has become a symbol of this problem. Miller has endorsed cutting entitlement programs such as Social Security. As PR Week reported, Miller’s Burson-Marsteller was retained by billionaire Pete Peterson’s Fix the Debt campaign to help advocate for spending cuts to reduce the national debt.

Miller, in response to a query from Republic Report, says he has “always kept my editors and producers at my various outlets informed about my business activities, and have routinely made disclosures on air or in print where a reader or audience member should know of such work to avoid any conflict.” On KCRW radio, where Miller has hosted the popular show Left, Right, and Center, Miller says he has mentioned on air that he is an adviser to GE chief executive Jeffrey Immelt. ”I advised on strategy, policy and communications, and helped lead work on two reports issued by McKinsey’s education practice on the achievement gap and on elevating the teaching profession in the US. At Burson, I advised clients on external communications and reputation matters, and helped with client development,” Miller says.

As Republic Report has reported, several lobbyists and consultants working in the world of corporate advocacy have made the jump to run for Congress this year. In Virginia, we revealed that Republican candidate Ed Gillespie has been quietly consulting for oil and gas lobbying groups, while also advising firms such as AT&T and Bank of America. In North Carolina, we disclosed the many financial industry clients of Taylor Griffin, an establishment backed candidate who failed in his primary bid against Congressman Walter Jones (R-NC).

This post has been updated to correct and clarify information about the timing of Miller’s income from certain clients, in particular to clarify that Miller stopped working for the above-cited clients by the time he launched his campaign. We regret the error. Miller also says that his payments from GE and American Express related to his work advising President Obama’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. The two companies, Miller says, shared expenses for his services. After publication of this article, Miller contacted Republic Report but would not reveal the identity of his Burson-Marsteller clients.

This post was originally published at RepublicReport.org.

One of the many consulting firms retained to build support for the Keystone XL, a controversial pipeline to bring oil sands in Canada to Gulf Coast refineries, failed to disclose its activities as federal law appears to have required. Through a records request, Republic Report has found that the Alberta government hired a public relations company called Feverpress to promote the pipeline last year.

Feverpress, run by Hilary Lefebvre and David Press, was retained for $65,000. In a memo to David Manning, Alberta’s lobbyist in Washington, DC, Feverpress said they had reached out to “producers and reporters to gauge the level of interest in the Keystone issue and to introduce the premier as a spokesperson to speak on behalf of Canadian efforts to secure approval of the pipeline.” The invoice shows a payment titled “Public Relations Services Relating to Keystone Pipeline.”

The firm pledged to reach out to “bigger targets” in the media, including Charlie Rose and Piers Morgan. “We have devised a strategy to focus interest on Alberta as a contributor to the US economy and environmental sustainability, to take advantage of ongoing media interest in energy security, seasonal interest in gasoline prices, and responding to increased efforts by the environmental community to portray Keystone’s impact in a very negative way,” wrote the firm to their clients in Canada.

The final decision on the Keystone XL will be made by President Barack Obama. To influence the process, a number of interest groups that stand to gain from approval of the pipeline have conducted a multi-year promotional campaign.

Critics say approval will drastically boost carbon emissions because the pipeline will vastly accelerate high-carbon tar sands production. NASA scientist James Hansen has declared that the pipeline is a “fuse to the biggest carbon bomb on the planet.”

The Alberta government has gone to great lengths to build public support for the Keystone XL. Last year, Alberta retained consulting firms Rasky Baerlein Strategic Communications and Mehlman Vogel Castagnetti to help with Keystone XL outreach among reporters and public officials. As DeSmogBlog’s Brendan DeMelle noted, both firms are led by former staffers to political leaders central to the Keystone XL approval process, including Secretary of State John Kerry.

According to her website biography, Feverpress’ Hilary Lefebvre is a former “communications official in the Hillary Clinton for President campaign.”

But Rasky Baerlein Strategic Communications and Mehlman Vogel Castagnetti were reported last year as Alberta clients because both firms registered and disclosed their activities as required by the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Feverpress did not.

“If Feverpress was hired on behalf of the government of Alberta or any foreign political party to conduct a public relations campaign in the United States to affect public policy, Feverpress would be required to register under FARA and disclose its compensation, clients and lobbying activities,” says Craig Holman, an ethics expert with Public Citizen.

The Foreign Agents Registration Act was adopted in 1938 after reports that the Nazi government was attempting to influence American public opinion to not intervene in World War II. The law requires registration and disclosure of foreign principals attempting to influence American public policy through public relations campaigns as well as direct lobbying.

The contract with Alberta states Feverpress was brought on to devise “media strategy” regarding “the Keystone XL and oil sands development…to ensure continued and expanded market access to the US for Alberta oil sands resources.” The communications obtained by Republic Report show that Feverpress attempted to book former Alberta premiere Alison Redford on media programs including Morning Joe, Andrea Mitchell Reports, Piers Morgan Live and The Lead with Jake Tapper.

Contacted by Republic Report for comment, Kevin Armstrong, a public affairs officer with Alberta International and Intergovernmental Relations, said consultants retained by his agency register on their own under applicable laws. “We expect the companies we contract with to abide by the law,” said Armstrong.

Feverpress could not provide a comment when reached by Republic Report.

A copy of the Feverpress contract and invoice with Alberta can be found here.

Earlier this year, Republic Report revealed that other interest groups have been working behind the scenes to promote the pipeline. In February, we reported on a group of oil refinery companies that have spent millions of dollars to finance pro-pipeline grassroots organizations and campaign ads. We also reported that a prominent economic analysis firm that had produced a report downplaying environmental concerns regarding the Keystone XL had been quietly retained by Alberta for a lucrative consulting contract.

This article was reported in partnership with The Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute.

In a presentation at the Drake Hotel in Chicago last October, Joseph Kefauver addressed a conference of executives from companies like Nike, Macy’s and Crate & Barrel, among other leading brands. Kefauver, a key player in the rising cottage industry of lobbyists and consultants hired by the retail sector, warned his audience that a new movement was taking hold, one that could leverage the “exponential growth of grassroots networks” to force change at corporations beyond the reach of traditional labor unions. These activists, Kefauver explained in his PowerPoint presentation, could create pressure in the media, throughout a supply chain, and even in the policy and political arena, making them a threat to business’s bottom line unlike any other. In addition, he noted ominously, these new groups are spreading beyond the big cities and blue states and have established a “left-of-center beachhead in traditionally conservative areas.”

The conference attendees were then asked to consider the pushback. “How aggressive can we be?” one slide read. “How do we challenge the social justice narrative?” queried another.

Kefauver is a former executive for public affairs at Walmart and a former political action committee staffer for Darden Restaurants, the parent company of chain eateries like Olive Garden and Red Lobster. As a full-time consultant at firms that serve the restaurant and retail industry, he is part of a phalanx of lobbyists and political operatives with a small but focused goal: to destroy what has become known as the “worker center” movement.

Kefauver’s alarm at the rise of worker centers, which he has repeated in talks with the US Chamber of Commerce and other business trade groups, isn’t simply bluster. Just as conservatives aimed their fire—to devastating effect—at organized labor and low-wage advocacy groups like ACORN in the past decade, right-wing lobbyists and the businesses that pay them are going after worker centers today because they recognize their potency. With unions in decline—a fact celebrated in one recent ad targeting worker centers—the “alt-labor” movement has helped jump-start a nationwide effort to reshape working conditions for millions of Americans in low-wage jobs. The question is: Can worker centers escape the fate of other, similarly situated groups targeted by corporate smear campaigns?

* * *

Though many worker centers began as localized efforts to combat poverty, the movement has rapidly spread and matured. These groups still help low-wage workers find legal representation and understand their rights at work. But many now coordinate their organizing with other community groups or labor unions across multiple regions. As Kefauver’s presentation suggested, worker centers are indeed organizing along corporate supply chains to achieve their demands. And in many cases, it’s working.

Arise Chicago, a faith-based nonprofit that founded a worker center in 2002, has helped win new safety agreements for hotel workers; negotiate a new city ordinance to crack down on wage theft; and mobilize Walmart employees for an unprecedented set of strikes aimed at hiking pay and benefits. In Florida, the pioneering farmworker group the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) has successfully pressed for a wide-ranging labor agreement with major food companies to curb abusive working conditions. The Restaurant Opportunities Center, which began as a New York–based group that organized a small number of waiters and waitresses, is now a federation that spans the largest restaurant markets in the country and has come to represent an alternative for consumers seeking information about the industry.

With this success has come a new, all-out assault by business. Many observers point to a full-page ad in The Wall Street Journal last July sponsored by Rick Berman, a longtime lobbyist for the restaurant and agricultural industry, as the first major shot across the bow. As The New York Times reported, Berman has since launched his own website filled with negative information about worker centers and has appeared regularly in the media to criticize the movement, particularly the Restaurant Opportunities Center.

“I think that businesses are going after worker centers because they view them as much more effective than they used to be,” says Janice Fine, an associate professor of labor studies and employment relations at Rutgers University. Calling the increasing attacks on worker centers a “backhanded compliment,” Fine notes that the centers are “no longer looked at as local organizations.”

Some of the pushback has been overt. A Google search for “OUR Walmart” produces as its first result a web page sponsored by the retail behemoth, claiming that the group exists solely to benefit the interests of the United Food and Commercial Workers union, one of its financial backers. Fox News and conservative talk radio have taken to reporting on worker-center-led demonstrations. Asked to describe a wave of fast-food strikes, Mallory Factor, speaking on Fox & Friends, suggested that the demonstrators were all paid to be there, calling them a “rent-a-mob, purely rent-a-mob.”

Some of the attacks, though, are less transparent. This past November, about a month after Kefauver’s presentation in Chicago, a group called Worker Center Watch launched a series of YouTube videos aimed at discrediting the Black Friday protests staged by worker centers against big-box retailers. One video depicted the activists as “professional protesters” who “haven’t bothered to get jobs themselves.” Another video from the group alleges that the Restaurant Opportunities Center (ROC), OUR Walmart and other worker centers are nothing more than union front groups designed to “make more money for greedy union bosses.” The video closes with an appeal not to be “fooled” by worker centers.

A week later, Worker Center Watch posted the transcript of an audio recording from a private worker-center meeting in New York that had been obtained by Breitbart News, the right-wing website founded by the late Andrew Breitbart. The headline blared about the offensive “Santa’s slaves” comments made by the organizers, though the actual recording was rather innocuous.

When contacted by The Nation, Worker Center Watch refused to reveal its backers. However, records obtained for this article show that Kefauver’s public relations firm, Parquet Public Affairs, registered the website for Worker Center Watch. After I inquired about the registration, the website hosting the record was concealed with a proxy.

Kefauver would not respond to multiple requests for comment on what he does or who is paying him. But he was listed as a “consultant” to the National Restaurant Association—the largest lobbying group for the restaurant industry and the driving force against raising the minimum wage—on a schedule posted by restaurant industry lobbyists for a meeting in San Antonio several months ago.

Around the same time last fall that Worker Center Watch released those YouTube videos, the group’s spokesman, Ryan Williams, showed up at a rally for the Coalition of Immokalee Workers. According to organizers, Williams was accompanied by a man who attempted to unfurl a giant Soviet flag in front of the CIW activist demonstration. Kate Kelly, a CIW supporter, asked the man who arrived with Williams to put the flag down and “respect the work many of us had done to organize the protest by not detracting from our specific message.”

The man refused, and Williams began snapping photographs of the flag in front of the worker activists. After the organizers confronted the man with the Soviet flag, he began walking across the street and left the demonstration with Williams. It was apparent to those present that Worker Center Watch wanted to depict the CIW as a fringe organization, even if that meant using an outsider to smear its image. Williams, a former hand on Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign, would not comment on the flag-waving incident.

“There are a million worker organizations out there that Worker Center Watch could attack, but they’re attacking us because someone is paying them to,” says Greg Asbed, the CIW’s co-founder. “They admit they’re funded by undisclosed businesses, and it doesn’t take much imagination to guess that businesses like Publix and Wendy’s might be among them.”

For worker centers like the CIW, dealing with the cloak-and-dagger tactics of the industry is now part of their job as organizers. When the organization began scaling up its agreement with tomato growers and fast-food chains, news reports revealed that a Burger King vice president had posed as his daughter on the Internet to post angry messages about the CIW, calling them “blood suckers” and “the lowest form of life.” The CIW also found out that a private detective firm had been retained to place one of its investigators, posing as a student, into the ranks of student activist groups supporting the coalition.

Other worker centers have been subjected to similar stunts. In 2012, Mercury Public Affairs, a lobbying firm retained by Walmart, was caught sending one of its employees, posing as a local reporter, into an event for Warehouse Workers United, a worker center based in Southern California.

* * *

The assault on alt-labor is multifaceted. Last July, a letter sponsored by Representatives John Kline of Minnesota and Phil Roe of Tennessee called on the federal government to investigate “the line between so-called ‘worker centers’ and labor organizations.” Following this letter, a range of business-friendly groups, including the US Chamber of Commerce and the Capital Research Center, a GOP think tank, issued similar reports tying worker centers to labor unions. “Some alt-labor tactics are as simple as creating union front groups to pressure companies into taking away the secret ballot from workers, making unionization easier via a card-check election,” claims F. Vincent Vernuccio in the Capital Research Center paper.

Littler Mendelson, a firm long associated with unionbusting, has tangled with ROC in court over its picketing of New York restaurants. In September, to the delight of fast-food lobbyists, the House Education and Workforce Committee, headed by Congressman Kline, invited Littler Mendelson to make a presentation at a hearing about the role of worker centers. “On behalf of the National Restaurant Association, we thank you,” read a letter from lobbyists with the association to Kline after the hearing. Notably, the hearing was called just as several lobbying groups, including the International Franchise Association, the Retail Industry Leaders Association and Cracker Barrel, disclosed that they had instructed their Capitol Hill representatives to start monitoring issues relating to worker centers.

The attacks occur with some frequency, as new groups crop up to undermine worker centers. Picking fights with restaurant workers has been good business for out-of-work GOP operatives.

There is the Workforce Fairness Institute, a reconstituted anti-union front now managed by WWP Strategies, a firm made up of Republican campaign staffers that include Katie Packard Gage, Mitt Romney’s deputy campaign manager in 2012. The Workforce Fairness Institute maintains ties to the Association of Builders and Contractors, an anti-union lobby made up largely of engineering and construction firms, and serves as a clearinghouse for opposition research on worker centers.

In 2012, an organization called Restaurant Opportunities Center Exposed appeared. The group exists primarily to smear ROC and its leaders, demand investigations of the center, and provide rebuttals to their statements in the press.

Mike Paranzino, a former corporate lobbyist, is the spokesman for ROC Exposed—and, like his cohorts, he refuses to say how his organization is funded. In interviews, he concedes that he has restaurant industry support but won’t reveal any names. Instead, Paranzino pivots to his target. “Unions are transforming themselves in the same way that ACORN didn’t just go away,” he said in an interview with a conservative radio host months ago.

Although it is now a distant memory, ACORN was once viewed by progressives as the key to empowering vulnerable communities in low-income areas. The organization provided help with housing, job placement, debt counseling and—in a move that attracted vehement Republican opposition—voter registration. But before filmmaker James O’Keefe used undercover videos—some of them deceptively edited—to destroy the group, ACORN faced an ever-increasing barrage of political attacks from the same cast of characters now leading the charge against the worker-center movement.

In 2008, the year before O’Keefe’s videos, the Capital Research Center called on lawmakers to prosecute ACORN for racketeering, voter fraud, money laundering and other alleged sins. None of these allegations stuck, though congressional Republicans embraced the proposed lines of attack, priming the public for a negative perception of ACORN, which became a household name when Sarah Palin used the waning days of the 2008 election to turn the group into a campaign issue.

Berman, the lobbyist who fired the first volley in the national campaign against worker centers last summer, found business in savaging the community organizers associated with ACORN. In 2008, he created the website Rotten ACORN, which he promoted with a full-page advertisement in The New York Times, to cast the group as an extremist organization prone to skirting the law. Berman’s current anti-worker-center campaign follows a similar playbook: full-page ads in major newspapers, a dubbed video depicting worker-center leaders as Nazis, and continual assertions that the centers are merely labor unions in disguise, using a 501(c)(3) designation to bypass labor regulations.

Saru Jayaraman, the co-founder of ROC, finds herself frequently in the crosshairs of the anti-worker-center campaign. For her, that’s not necessarily a bad thing if it helps build momentum for her cause. “When I’m asked about the attacks [in the media], the conversation always turns to a discussion of the minimum wage, which leads to talk about substantive policy and how that impacts consumers,” she says.

Jayaraman sees the similarity between the smears against her organization and those used against ACORN and organized labor, but she isn’t worried. “We’re different animals,” she says, noting that ROC has built a broad coalition that includes not only low-wage workers, but “the New York Times–reading crowd” and middle-class consumers. “We’ve been able to talk to a different population, and we’re speaking in places where a typical union leader probably wouldn’t speak out.”

Other experts note that worker centers don’t rely on state and federal contracts as ACORN did—so even if Republicans are able to gain steam with their investigations, little would come of it. And, says Fine, worker centers might prove to be more nimble than unions or ACORN given their diverse funding base, which includes foundations, labor unions and, in some cases, worker contributions.

* * *

A waitress in Washington, DC, who would identify herself only as “Catherine” says that groups like ROC have been a lifesaver. Explaining that she’s supposed to be earning more than her $2.77 minimum wage through tips, Catherine says that her manager often assigns her menial tasks without the opportunity to make tips. “They have us doing busy work when it’s slow, like cutting lemons or slicing potatoes,” she says. On slow shifts, Catherine takes home only $40 a day, though she sometimes makes up the difference on busy weekends. “It’s like roulette,” she groans.

Through ROC, Catherine says she has interacted with other workers at different restaurants and spoken to wage-theft experts. ROC’s DC chapter has waged battles large and small in the service industry, from pressuring chain eateries to improve their working conditions to helping pass a new city law this year that provides paid sick leave for tipped servers like Catherine. The larger goal, organizers say, is to eliminate the minimum wage disparity for tipped workers entirely, a reform that has already passed in seven states.

“I found out about ROC through word of mouth, and it’s really been great,” Catherine says. Asked about some of the attacks on worker centers like ROC—especially the claims that they are simply union front groups designed to profit off her—Catherine just laughs. “I don’t think that’s right,” she says.

This post was originally published at RepublicReport.org

Congressman Walter Jones, a Republican who represents a wide swath of eastern North Carolina, might not strike you as a populist. But as a lawmaker, the veteran politician with a slow Southern drawl has become a gadfly in his own party for thumbing his nose at powerful political interests. He is the only GOP co-sponsor of the DISCLOSE Act, a measure to reveal the donors of dark-money campaign advertisements. He is among the loudest critics of the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, telling an audience one that “Lyndon Johnson’s probably rotting in hell right now because of the Vietnam War, and he probably needs to move over for Dick Cheney.” And Speaker John Boehner removed Jones from the House Financial Services Committee, which oversees Wall Street. His sin? Bucking leadership and supporting many bills to further regulate the financial sector, along with serving as the last remaining House Republican to have voted for the Dodd-Frank reform package.

The Republican establishment has attempted to remove Jones from office by dispatching a number of primary challengers over the years. For this cycle, a former Bush administration aide named Taylor Griffin is the party favorite to finally wipe out Jones.

Several outlets, such as Bloomberg News, have reported that Griffin’s candidacy is being heavily promoted by the financial industry. JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and other banks helped fuel the $114,000 fundraising haul Griffin reported in his first campaign disclosure report. Earlier this week, a Super PAC financed in part by hedge fund titan Paul Singer went on air with a negative ad against Jones.

What hasn’t been reported, however, is that Griffin himself is a longtime political consultant for the biggest predators on Wall Street.

Republic Report has obtained a disclosure report that shows that Griffin’s client list reads like a who’s who of financial interests that have preyed upon North Carolina families for short term gain.

Griffin, whose career includes a stint on the the Bush election campaign team and Treasury Department, is a co-founder of Hamilton Place Strategies, a “policy and public affairs” firm that boasts of its team of former government officials. Like many companies that work to influence policy within the Beltway on behalf of corporate interests, Hamilton Place Strategies does not register under the Lobbying Disclosure Act, though it advertises its ability to shape the regulatory environment. The company, which specializes in public relations, is located a stone’s throw from K Street and the White House in a corridor of Washington favored by many influence peddlers.

Griffin touts himself as a conservative small businessman. His campaign website “About” section makes only a passing reference to his prior position with Hamilton Place Strategies, noting obliquely that he founded a “leading public policy consulting firm, quickly growing it to a business that included over 20 employees on its payroll.” Before launching his campaign in October, Griffin sold his share of the firm and moved to New Bern, a city within North Carolina’s third congressional district.

Griffin’s client list has never before been reported. But a mandatory candidate filing, disclosed by the House Clerk last week, opens a window into his business operation.

Griffin worked for Lender Processing Services Inc. (LPS), the infamous company that forged foreclosure documents on behalf of the big banks. In a practice that became known as “robo-signing,” LPS created more than “1 million fraudulently signed and notarized mortgage-related documents with property recorders’ offices throughout the United States.” Citigroup, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase and Ally Financial allegedly used robo-signing to engage in unlawful foreclosures. The robo-signing tactics were reportedly used extensively in North Carolina.

Though Griffin revealed his LPS work on his disclosure form, he also refused to list other clients, noting that “certain confidential clients are not reported due to terms of agreement into at the time services were retained.” But public statements from his company, including from Tony Fratto, another co-founder of Hamilton Place Strategies, shows the firm has been working for Magnetar Capital, a hedge fund famous for helping helping inflate the housing bubble that led to the 2008 financial crisis.

In a Pulitzer Prize–winning article for ProPublica, reporter Jesse Eisinger revealed that Magnetar helped create “arcane mortgage-based instruments, pushed for risky things to go inside them and then bet against the investments,” a scheme that earned them hundreds of millions of dollars. Now, according to reports, Magnetar is back in the housing business, taking advantage of low prices to buy up homes and rent them out.

As part of their strategy to dupe investors, Magnetar allegedly enlisted the rating agency Standard & Poor’s to provide a high-level A-grade listing for Magnetar’s synthetic financial products. Though it’s not clear what he did for the firm, Griffin lists McGraw Hill Financial, the parent company of Standard & Poor’s, as one of his clients (the firm has been accused of engaging in other fraudulent rating schemes that led to the financial collapse).

Another Griffin client, according to his ethics form, is an interest group that is actively lobbying to hike property insurance rates on North Carolina families, including those in the Outer Bankers region Griffin hopes to represent.

Griffin works for the Property Casualty Insurers Association of America, a trade association for property insurers. This year, the PCIAA promoted a state property insurance hike as high as 35 percent on homeowners in North Carolina beach communities. In Washington, the PCIAA’s team of ten registered lobbyists worked to oppose the Homeowner Flood Insurance Affordability Act, recently passed legislation designed to “freeze premium increases on most homes governed by flood-insurance rate maps.”

As The Charlotte Observer reported, without this legislation, some coastal families faced flood insurance rate hikes from $850 a year now to as high as $21,000.

Griffin’s campaign did not respond to Republic Report’s request for comment about his personal finances. The forms, however, have other revelations.

Griffin has told reporters that he sold his shares in Hamilton Place Strategies, suggesting that he is no longer affiliated with the firm or in public policy consulting. However, the disclosure reports show that he has continued to earn a living from Hamilton Place Strategies—at least in excess of $5,000—and this year earned income (likely through his other consulting firm, Sulgrave Partners) from PCIAA, McGrawHill Financial, Huron Healthcare, Motorola Mobility and other clients.

In his first television advertisement that began airing this month before the May 5 primary, Griffin says that he is the “clear conservative choice for Congress.” In a spot that is clearly biographical in nature, Griffin references his consulting work for the financial sector interests thus: “I’ve also owned my own business, so I know what it means to make a budget and stick to it.” Left unsaid, the $406,000 a year he earned promoting the very worst of Wall Street.

This post was originally published at RepublicReport.org

Only one day after the Center for Public Integrity’s reporting series on denials of black lung benefits to coal miners was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) defended the controversial law firm at the center of the investigation.

As he stepped to the podium of the National Western Mining Convention in Denver on Tuesday, Manchin heaped praise upon Jackson Kelly, a sponsor of the event and the law firm implicated in unethically concealing medical evidence of miners dying of black lung.

“I want to thank my dear friends at Jackson Kelly,” exclaimed the senator. In his remarks, Manchin also noted that his former staffer, Kelly Goes, is now an employee of the firm.

In a brief interview with Republic Report after his speech, Manchin was asked about Jackson Kelly’s conduct regarding black lung cases. He brushed aside criticism of the firm.

The Center for Public Integrity story revealed that Jackson Kelly has systemically denied coal miners black lung benefit claims by withholding unfavorable evidence and shaping the opinions of doctors called upon in court. CFPI Reporter Chris Hamby’s investigation “suggests that there has been a pattern and practice by lawyers at the Jackson Kelly law firm which has compromised the integrity of the black lung benefits program and potentially tainted numerous decisions adversely affecting coal miners and their survivors,” wrote Representatives George Miller (D-California) and Joe Courtney (D-Connecticut) in a letter to the Department of Labor last year.

“If the law firm is doing their job and we don’t like it, we’ve got to look at the rules and laws we have on the books,” said Manchin, after being asked by Republic Report about his praise of Jackson Kelly. “They’ve been a prestigious law firm for a long time in West Virginia. There’s good people that I know that work there and if there’s something that’s wrong and needs to be fixed or changed, it will be,” he continued.

A Jackson Kelly attorney named Douglas Smoot had his law license suspended in 2011 for one year after being accused of hiding evidence in a black lung case. Other Jackson Kelly attorneys have faced investigations over their conduct in regards to black lung cases. One retired judge who handled black lung cases reviewed documents obtained by the Center for Public Integrity investigation and said the firm had been “really misleading the court.”

Manchin is a close ally to the coal industry. At the conference, he touted his new legislation that would block the EPA from implementing new regulations on coal power plants. Jackson Kelly, according to its website, has represented the coal industry since the mid-19th century.

As Public Campaign noted, Manchin has “received $50,825 from Jackson Kelly employees during his time in Congress, his seventh-largest donor.”

Manchin did not sign on to the letter from other congressional Democrats asking the Labor Department to investigate claims that Jackson Kelly improperly concealed medical evidence of black lung claims.

Yet Manchin told us that he is confident that any potential wrongdoing will be worked out.

“You can’t find people guilty before they go through the process. Are you accusing them of being guilty?” said Manchin. Asked again about the Center for Public Integrity report, Manchin replied, “I’m just saying, let’s see where it unfolds.”

Watch the interview below:

This post was originally published at RepublicReport.org

Today, the congressional Energy and Commerce committee's  subcommittee on Energy and Power is scheduled to hold a hearing on Representative Cory Gardner’s (R-CO) bill to force the Obama administration to approve all applications for new liquefied natural gas terminals used to export natural gas. A close look at the staffers involved with this particular subcommittee reveals that several have close ties to the LNG industry.

– Energy and Power staff counsel Patrick Currier is a former lobbyist for gas and energy companies, including the Gas Processors Association, FirstEnergy Corp, and the CCS Alliance.

– Energy and Power chief counsel Tom Hassenboehler is a former lobbyist for America’s Natural Gas Alliance, one of the most vocal trade groups pushing to build more LNG export capacity.

The chair of the subcommittee, Representative Ed Whitfield (R-KY), also has a stake in this debate. The most recently available personal finance disclosures show Whitfield holds between $250,000-$500,000 in stock with ExxonMobil and holds between $250,000-$500,000 with Chevron — two companies that would gain substantially from new LNG export terminals. ExxonMobil is heavily invested in expanding into the LNG industry, and last week, posted an item on its company blog criticizing the Department of Energy for its “go-slow approach to processing [LNG terminal] applications.” Earlier this month, Chevron chairman John Watson told a crowd in Houston that there’s “no question that sufficient gas exists in the US and Canada to export globally.”

Bill Cooper, president of the Center for Liquified Natural Gas, a pro-LNG export association, said he is “happy” about the wave of political support. “We didn’t gin up the Ukrainian crisis. We didn’t gin up the idea that it ought to be connected in some way to LNG exports. But Congress did, obviously, and a lot of editorials, experts and geopolitical analysts have all jumped on that. We appreciate the attention that LNG exports are receiving, and if it does provide a catalyst to make something happen that heretofore has not, then we’re going to be very happy with that,” Cooper told NGI Daily.

On the other side of Capitol Hill, Senator Mary Landrieu (D-LA) held her own hearing on the topic of LNG exports. “Landrieu is expected to make the case that an increase in liquified natural gas exports would create high-paying jobs and turn the US into an energy superpower,” buzzed The Hill’s Overnight Energy before the hearing.

As Republic Report has noted, pundits and politicians closely aligned with the LNG industry have used the crisis in Ukraine to demand more LNG exports, even though doing so would not hamper Russia’s dominance over the market or affect the price of gas in the region.

]]>https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/staffers-managing-gardners-lng-export-hearing-are-former-gas-lobbyists/https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/pundit-politician-demands-solve-crimean-crisis-fueled-gas-lobby/Lee Fang,Lee Fang,Lee Fang,Lee Fang,Lee Fang,Lee Fang,Lee Fang,Lee Fang,Lee Fang,Lee Fang,Lee Fang,Lee Fang,Lee Fang,Lee Fang,Edward Hart,Lee Fang,Lee Fang,Lee Fang,Lee Fang,Lee Fang,Lee Fang,Lee Fang,Lee Fang,Lee Fang,Lee Fang,Lee Fang,Lee Fang,Lee Fang,Lee Fang,Lee Fang,Lee FangMar 20, 2014News reports and politicians lauding US gas exports as “best for Crimea” don’t disclose the US gas companies pushing the line, or their Russian connections.

Lee Fang is a reporting fellow with The Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute.

Four months into his first term, Governor Chris Christie stood at the podium of the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, and laid out what was billed as the “Christie Reform Agenda.” To enthusiastic applause, the New Jersey governor railed against what he described as an out-of-control state public pension system. “Our benefits are too rich, and our employees aren’t contributing enough, either,” he said. “We are careening our way toward becoming Greece.”

Christie had just won his first statewide election with the help of Paul Singer, the hedge fund manager who chairs the Manhattan Institute. The month before Christie’s election victory in November 2009, Singer had given $100,000 to the Republican Governors Association (RGA), which aired a barrage of advertisements in Christie’s favor.

In that campaign, among Christie’s lines of attack against incumbent Democrat Jon Corzine was that he had mismanaged the state pension system and had unethically invested retiree money on Wall Street. “Jon Corzine made it easier for his friends from Wall Street to manage New Jersey’s pension fund,” blasted a “Christie for Governor” press release.

But once he was elected, Governor Christie moved to award big pension management contracts to the Wall Street donors who have helped boost his political fortunes. In his second year in office, Christie’s administration proposed giving Singer’s hedge fund, Elliott Associates, a contract to manage $200 million in state public pension funds. Elliott Associates won the contract in 2012. Singer again demonstrated his political loyalty to Christie in December 2013, shortly after Christie became chair of the RGA, a coveted post for GOP presidential aspirants. This time, Singer gave the group $1.25 million, making him the largest contributor that year and significantly enlarging the RGA’s war chest under Christie.

Another hedge fund manager with close political ties to Christie, Daniel Loeb, has also won big contracts to manage state retiree money under the governor, The Nation has found.

Before it was tarnished by Bridgegate, Christie’s political brand hinged on the governor’s celebrated efforts to reform the public pension system—including his moves to increase the retirement age for some workers, cut benefits, and make adjustments to how much state employees pay into the plan. Less noticed was how, under Christie, the amount of retiree money in the hands of outside managers, such as private equity firms or hedge funds like Singer’s, dramatically increased, while the share going to less risky and more traditional investments like treasury notes or the S&P 500 declined.

* * *

Like many of the characters in the Bridgegate scandal, a key player in the Christie pension cronyism story has roots in his hometown of Livingston, New Jersey.

Before Christie was named class president of Livingston High School, another ambitious young man, Robert Grady, held that title. Grady helped bring a teenage Christie into local politics by introducing him to his father, the mayor of Livingston. The younger Grady would become something of a mentor to the future governor: he introduced Christie to political leaders in Trenton and, later, to GOP leaders like Dan Quayle and Jim Baker. Bill Palatucci, who would become Christie’s law partner and close political adviser, also came into contact with Christie through Grady, according to an interview that Grady gave to the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University.

Grady’s career, including a stint in the George H.W. Bush administration, eventually evolved into work in private equity. He spent a number of years at the Carlyle Group before becoming managing director of Cheyenne Capital, a Wyoming-based private equity firm. In 2010, Christie named him to the State Investment Council, which oversees New Jersey’s Division of Investment and has ultimate authority over how the pension funds get invested. He quickly became chair, an unpaid position of great influence. In an address to the Legislature last year, Christie personally thanked Grady for leading the pension system and investing the state’s money “wisely.”

“I think we’ve done a great job of having no politics in the system,” said Grady in an interview with The Nation. “We’ve kept the focus on maximizing returns for the beneficiaries while minimizing risk appropriately.”

But others argue that the close relationships between politicians, trustees, investment advisers and campaign contributors are a recipe for financial decision-making that puts private interests ahead of the public good. “There is no question that the current system in which politicians pick trustees, and trustees and their companies contribute to political entities that support the same politicians, is a type of institutional corruption that should not exist,” says Jay Youngdahl, an attorney and Network Fellow at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University.

New Jersey law prohibits financial firms that manage state retiree money from contributing to state political campaigns. In 2010, the Securities and Exchange Commission also promulgated new rules to curb direct campaign donations to officials in charge of public pension programs. The regulations, however, do not necessarily cover the outside spending organizations—i.e., Super PACs—that have come to dominate recent elections.

The RGA—a 527 organization that can accept and spend unlimited amounts of money, much like a Super PAC, and that has frequently fueled the presidential bids of GOP governors—has allowed hedge fund managers to boost Christie’s political fortunes without running directly afoul of ethics laws.

In Christie’s first election as well as his re-election campaign last year, the RGA spent big to sweep him into office. In his first race for governor, the RGA provided a critical $5 million in outside spending on Christie’s behalf. In 2013, the group spent more than $1.7 million in support of Christie’s bid to defeat challenger Barbara Buono, a Democratic state senator.

Loeb, the founder of a hedge fund called Third Point and, like Singer, one of the most active GOP donors in the country, was also a major contributor to the RGA, donating $250,000 last year. Two years prior to Loeb’s donation, Christie appointees at the pension fund awarded Third Point a contract to manage $100 million in state retiree funds.

In 2011, Loeb and Singer reportedly joined other Republican financiers in what The New York Times dubbed the “Draft Christie committee” to urge the governor to run for president. At the time, Loeb’s fund had already commenced its contract to manage New Jersey pension money, and Singer’s fund had just been presented to the State Investment Council.

When asked about the contributions of Singer and Loeb to political groups supporting Christie, Grady said, “I’m not familiar with their giving, so I can’t really answer it. I’m aware the state has invested in them, and I’m sure the state has invested in many funds that have given to either party. But as far as who they’ve given to and what their conflicts may be, it’s not something that has come before our council and not something I’ve tracked.”

Grady, in fact, served as a strategist for the governor’s re-election campaign. How plausible is it that the man charting Christie’s long-term political future was unaware of the largest donations to a committee that Christie now helms, and which played a crucial role in financing his campaigns?

* * *

State pension plans that rely on hedge funds and other so-called “alternative investments” perform worse overall than those with more conservative strategies such as Treasury notes or the S&P 500, according to many studies, including recent reports from the Maryland Tax Education Foundation and Yale professor Roger Ibbotson. Critics charge that hedge funds not only are far more risky investments, but also that they produce less value because they carry hefty management fees and are entitled to a portion of future profits.

Early in his administration, Christie appointees at the Division of Investment pledged to double its allocation for “alternative investments,” with a goal of moving 33.2 percent of the $74.7 billion fund into an array of hedge funds, private equity firms and real estate deals. “For large pools of capital, I think it’s prudent to have both private equity and hedge funds as part of the mix of a diversified portfolio,” said Grady in 2010, shortly after voting to substantially increase the amount of New Jersey pension funds managed by hedge funds and other alternative investments.

“This started with Corzine,” says Hetty Rosenstein, head of CWA New Jersey, part of the Communications Workers of America, a union that represents many public workers in the state. “Many years ago, these investments were very conservative. But now they’ve changed that, and we’re invested in hedge funds and much more volatile investments from outside managers with high fees.”

According to industry reports, New Jersey now has the second-largest allocation in the country of state retiree money being managed by hedge funds. In 2013, the New Jersey pension program delivered a return of 11.79 percent—lower than the pension median of 16.1 percent that year. Part of the lower return, according to analysts, related to the amount allocated to alternative funds rather than to US equities. Fees also contributed to the smaller return. For example, hedge funds typically charge a 2 percent management fee on top of a 20 percent performance fee. The fees can quickly eat into any future gains, while making losses even more painful. In contrast, index funds or other, more traditional investments carry few (if any) fees.

A spokesperson for the Division of Investment disputed this characterization, claiming that any shortfall in the New Jersey pension fund’s performance in 2013 was the result of its relatively diversified portfolio, which has contributed to its steady performance in recent years.

But for critics, the long-term risks and the fees attached to alternative investments simply don’t justify the payoff. Chris Tobe, a former trustee of Kentucky Retirement Systems, estimates that outside money managers for the alternative investment program earned about $1.2 billion in management and performance fees from New Jersey’s public pension plan in 2013. “No wonder Wall Street loves Christie,” Tobe remarks. He estimates that in 2013 alone, Loeb’s fund collected nearly $5.2 million in fees from the New Jersey public pension fund, while Singer’s fund collected about $8.6 million.

The push for bigger investments in hedge funds was not a unanimous decision. James Marketti, a union representative on the State Investment Council, protested the move vehemently.

“I objected to the alternatives continually, because they are inherently more risky and certainly more corrupt,” Marketti says. He’s a retired former president of CWA Local 1032 and served on the board from 2008 to 2012 as the AFL-CIO Public Employee Committee representative. He says he presented research to the board on the fees associated with alternative funds, but he was also suspicious of finance industry cronyism.

“They all do business with that side of the universe,” Marketti says, pointing out that the Corzine and Christie administration appointees to the Division of Investment maintained cozy relationships with the same private equity and hedge fund managers that have won large state pension contracts.

* * *

The Christie administration’s embrace of exotic investment funds contrasts sharply with his rhetoric as a candidate, when he criticized Corzine’s experiment with alternative investments, which began in 2006. Christie called on Corzine to personally divest from TPG, a private equity firm that the state pension fund had invested in during his tenure. “It’s one thing for Jon Corzine to gamble with his own personal wealth, but it’s another to put at risk New Jersey taxpayer dollars by turning them over to his casino-license-holding partners at TPG,” said then-candidate Christie.

Christie campaign allies also went on the attack. Bill Baroni, a Republican politician forced to resign from the Port Authority over his role in the Bridgegate scandal, said Corzine’s decision to use pension fund money on alternative investments “opened up the door to the perception of politics.”

To watchdogs of state pensions, the Christie cronyism story is just the latest example of Wall Street gorging at the public trough. In Rhode Island, State Treasurer Gina Raimondo, a Democrat, has faced criticism for receiving political support from hedge funds that have been given large management contracts for the state pension program under her leadership.

“The huge increase in ‘alternative investment’ management fees over the past five years at public pensions has created multiple conflicts and potential for conflict,” says Tobe, a former whistleblower on fraud at the Kentucky pension fund and author of the book Kentucky Fried Pensions.

To other critics, the Christie administration’s management of the state pension program is characteristic of a governor who seeks to reward his friends, while sometimes ruthlessly punishing his opponents.

“This Livingston High School reunion thing that goes on with Chris Christie… David Wildstein, involved in Bridgegate—he went to high school with Chris Christie. Now you’re talking about Bob Grady—he goes back to high school with Chris Christie,” says Rosenstein. “He’s got these long-term relationships with people who then benefit enormously.”

This story was reported in partnership with The Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute, where Lee Fang is a reporting fellow.

In a small regulatory office 
in Sacramento, California, in 2007, a handful of farmworkers and scientists gathered to explain to state officials why chlorpyrifos, a widely used pesticide, should be considered a toxicant under Proposition 65, a state law that pro
hibits businesses from discharging substances known to cause birth defects and reproductive harm into the drinking water.

Chlorpyrifos, an organophosphate insecticide, was first developed as a cousin to the nerve agents stockpiled during World War II. The chemical has been banned for household use for more than a decade, and studies have shown that infants born to mothers with high levels of chlorpyrifos in their bodies have significantly higher rates of neurodevelopmental disorders, problems with in utero development, brain impairments, low birth weights and endocrine disruption.

Workers who handle produce, though less at risk, are also endangered by exposure to chlorpyrifos, a chemical sprayed to kill worms and other pests. Many have been found to experience headaches, seizures and bouts of vomiting.

But in the agricultural fields of America, where mostly migrant laborers and their families work to produce almonds, corn, peaches, grapes, alfalfa and other crops, chlorpyrifos is still applied with regularity. The chemical is known to stay on the bodies and clothing of workers when they return home to their families, and it easily drifts with the wind into local community 
buildings—from daycare centers and hospitals to churches and playgrounds. California farmers use about
1.3 million pounds of it every year.

Remembering that meeting in Sacramento, Margaret Reeves, a senior scientist with the Pesticide Action Network (PAN), recalls that people critical of chlorpyrifos “each got one to two minutes to speak.” Then came the scientists working for Dow Chemical, the principal manufacturer of the chemical in the United States.

“There were five Dow scientists, and they each got five to ten minutes. It was mind-boggling, the preference for their input over the victims and the consumer rights advocates and the farmworker advocates,” says Dr. Reeves.

The advocates have also been overpowered financially by the industry. Over the last decade, PAN has spent about $21,000 on lobbying in Sacramento. Dow, meanwhile, has spent more than $1.2 million on lobbying in the California capital during the same period.

In the end, chlorpyrifos was not deemed by the state to be a toxic substance subject to regulation under California’s Prop 65.

This imbalance of power in favor of industry also prevails at the national level, stalling progress in Washington on protecting farmworkers from dangerous chemicals used in agriculture.

In 1996, Congress passed the Food Quality Protection Act, which required the EPA to create standards for protecting children from pesticide use by 2006. That deadline has long since passed, and critics argue there has not been enough regulatory action. The EPA has also refused a request from PAN North America and the Natural Resources Defense Council for a ban on chlorpyrifos.

Finally, in January of this year, the EPA opened for public comment a rule on evaluating the environmental and human health risks caused by pesticide drift from farms into nearby areas, including homes and schools. And last month, the agency released a long-awaited proposal to update safety laws regarding the handling of pesticides by farmworkers.

But pesticide manufacturers are poised to beat back the EPA’s efforts. CropLife America—a trade group for companies including Dow, Bayer and DuPont that spends more than $14 million a year on research and advocacy—is not only in close communication with the EPA; it has worked with congressional allies to block the agency’s attempts at regulation. The organization called on Representative Darrell Issa of California, chair of the House Oversight Committee, to investigate the administration for pursuing agricultural regulations, including the so-called “spray-drift” rules. According to CropLife officials, these reforms “unnecessarily cost farmers time, money and liability, and significantly impact U.S. agriculture and the economy.” In response, Issa has held multiple hearings to undermine the EPA—under the guise of protecting “Job Creators Still Buried by Red Tape,” as one session relating to the EPA regulations on pesticides was titled.

Dow Chemical and other companies are relying on close ties forged with other legislators, particularly those in the Republican Party. In addition to Issa’s committee, a number of GOP legislators have sponsored amendments to appropriation bills that would block EPA action on pesticide rules. The recently passed farm bill included a bipartisan amendment exempting certain forms of pesticide pollution from enforcement under the Clean Water Act.

Farmworker advocates can bring few political resources to the table, but the pesticide industry extends the promise of re-election to its allies. After the 
Supreme Court enabled unlimited corporate spending 
in politics with its Citizens United decision, Dow Chemical increased its contributions to politically active nonprofits. The company hiked donations to the US Chamber of Commerce from $1.7 million in 2009 to more than $2.9 million in 2012. These funds augmented the $644,143 in direct contributions made by Dow’s political action committee to largely Republican federal candidates in the last election.

In a troubling display of post–Citizens United politics, the American Chemistry Council, another trade group funded by Dow and other pesticide producers, began airing campaign-style advertisements in favor of industry-friendly politicians, even those in safe seats. In many cases, the ads have aired well more than a year before the election, a visible reminder that allegiance to chemical companies comes with political rewards.

Although studies in California suggest that a shift from chlorpyrifos to less toxic pesticides would come at minimal cost to farmers, the transition has been slow. And for Dow, which manufactures two chlorpyrifos-based products, Dursban and Lorsban, the status quo is quite lucrative: the company, which produces a range of chemical products, generated over $4.8 billion in profits last year.

* * *

Dow has not only emerged as a powerhouse 
of traditional lobbying; it has also kept up the pressure on regulators in other ways. The company maintains a website, Chlorpyrifos Protects (chlorpyrifos.com), that gives the public an accessible platform for sending letters to the EPA opposing regulation.

Meanwhile, informational fact sheets distributed by Dow attempt to sow doubt about the potential health risks. “Since any substance can cause harm given sufficient exposure, nothing can be called ‘safe’ in absolute terms,” reads one chlorpyrifos white paper sponsored by the company. “A couple tablets of aspirin, for example, can relieve a headache. But an overdose of aspirin can be fatal.”

These efforts, however extensive, are only the more aboveground forms of advocacy. If the battle over atrazine, another controversial pesticide, is any indication, more subterranean lobbying is probably afoot.

As recent court documents reveal, Syngenta, the producer of atrazine, doled out grants to a wide array of public relations firms, political pundits and think tanks to discredit Berkeley professor Tyrone Hayes, whose research found that atrazine causes reproductive deformities in frogs. (A recent article in The New Yorker by Rachel Aviv chronicled the company’s years-long campaign against Hayes.) Some tactics used by Syngenta were reminiscent of the ’90s-era tobacco wars, or the more recent attempts by the fossil-fuel industry to block action on climate change. Right-leaning think tanks—including the Cato Institute, the Heartland Institute, the American Enterprise Institute and the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise—were listed in Syngenta’s internal “third party stakeholder” database. Officials from some of the organizations on that list received contributions from Syngenta to place opinion pieces in local media defending atrazine. To win over journalists and scientists, Syngenta offered expense-paid trips to Switzerland, where the company is based.

But there were also some innovations in building influence. A Syngenta public relations document instructs company officials to purchase “Tyrone Hayes” as a search term on the Internet, “so that anytime someone searches for Tyrone’s material, the first thing they see is our material, not his,” according to filings with the Madison County Circuit Court in Illinois.

Syngenta officials also debated whether to encourage CropLife America, the pesticide trade association now fighting the spray-drift rule, to lead a pro-pesticide campaign to shift public opinion. Citing recent industry efforts to reshape the perception of biotechnology and the plastics industry, Syngenta concluded that “the public image of Syngenta would improve if the public image of pesticides/pesticide companies 
improved overall.”

Dow, meanwhile, is accused of conducting an underhanded campaign against critics of chemicals like chlorpyrifos and di-
oxin. “Dow hired a private security firm to obtain confidential information about Greenpeace,” charges Charlie Cray, a research specialist with the environmental group. “The firm hired former intelligence and off-duty police officers to steal documents from Greenpeace’s offices and plant paid informants inside allied organizations.” Last year, after Greenpeace filed a lawsuit against Dow and other defendants, a Superior Court judge in Washington, DC, dismissed four of its claims—a decision the group is appealing—but allowed part of the suit to move forward. (Dow officials did not respond to requests for comment.)

In the current battle over pesticide regulation, Dow has given presentations to agricultural officials portraying groups like PAN as outside the mainstream. Last year, a Dow lobbyist in New Zealand attempted to downplay PAN’s arguments about chlori-
pyrifos. In one slide, he argued that the pesticide must be safe because it is not listed as a toxicant under Prop 65 in 
California—a state in which Dow dominates the political process.

* * *

While the larger efforts to control and
 regulate chlorpyrifos may have stalled, the EPA in February released a long-awaited rule to at least inform farmworkers of better safety standards for handling harmful pesticides. The original safety rule was created in the mid-1990s. Advocacy groups criticized it as weak and poorly enforced. An updated version was supposed to be released in 2008; why the EPA took another five-plus years to act remains a mystery.

The newly released rule builds on the existing regulations to ensure that all workers handling pesticides are at least 16 years old (except in cases of family farms). The rule also updates the law to ensure that workers will undergo training every year (rather than the previous standard of every five years) to learn about the health risks associated with pesticide use and how to handle these chemicals safely during application.

But along with that step forward, there has also been a step back. The EPA’s new standard removes a requirement that farms provide a central posting of information about pesticides. Under the new proposal, workers may obtain pesticide information if they ask for it, but the requirement that such information must be posted in an area where workers congregate has been eliminated.

So why the delays, and the arguably weakened pesticide safety rules? “Our best guess is that there has been very strong industry pushback,” says Dr. Reeves.

She might be on to something. White House logs show that just weeks before the EPA released the new worker-protection standard, there was at least one major meeting between administration officials and four senior officers from CropLife America.

Read all of the stories in this special report:

“How Pesticides Harm the Young Brain,” by Susan Freinkel
A pathbreaking study detects a range of developmental problems in children born to mothers who toiled in pesticide-treated fields—but will anything be done?

“6 Ways to Avoid Eating Pesticide Residue,” by Susan Freinkel
With regulation inadequate and children especially vulnerable, it makes sense for consumers to try to minimize exposure.

This post was originally published at RepublicReport.org

Need help navigating the proposal federal tax system overhaul? Covington & Burling, a major law-lobbying firm in Washington, DC, sent out a client alert recently announcing that former Senator Jon Kyl (R-AZ) stands ready to assist businesses seeking the best outcome of the legislative proposal led by Representative Dave Camp (R-MI) and Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR).

If enacted, the tax overhaul expected this year will change billions of dollars in tax credits and rates.

Kyl, however, is barred from lobbying because he left the senate last year and is still within the “cooling-off period.” The Honest Leadership and Open Government Act extends the ban on former senators engaging in lobbying from one to two years, leaving Kyl off the market for lobbying until January of 2015.

But as we’ve covered, lobbying law is poorly enforced and ambiguously defined. Former staffers and lawmakers prohibited from engaging in lobby activity often flout the law by engaging in meetings with officials, often with the cover that they’re just doing so in order to collect intelligence, rather than “lobby.”

Shortly after he retired from office, Kyl joined the lobbying team of Covington & Burling, euphemistically titled the “Public Policy and Government Affairs”division. And the tax reform alert, which is embedded below, notes that Kyl is part of a team that is actively communicating with government officials on legislation now debated in Congress (emphasis added):

Covington’s Public Policy and Government Affairs and Tax practice groups—which include Senator Jon Kyl, former top Republican on the Senate’s Finance Subcommittee on Taxation; former senior Treasury officials; and Ed Yingling, former President and CEO of the American Bankers Association (ABA) — are conversant with the details. Many of our team members are in regular consultation with senior Members of Congress, Treasury and IRS officials, and staffs of the Congressional tax-writing committees and are able to explain the hundreds of pages of proposals.

See the alert below:

Hot Topic Tax Reform

This post was originally published at RepublicReport.org

The Wall Street Journal’s Kimberley Strassel either has no understanding of campaign finance, or is willfully misleading her readers. In either case, her column today about the Koch brothers’ political spending—which parrots a meme that has bounced around conservative blogs and websites like a bad chain e-mail—gets the facts about Koch spending versus union spending completely wrong.

In her column, “The Really Big Money? Not the Kochs,” Strassel cites a Center for Responsive Politics list to claim that unions “collectively spent $620,873,623 more than Koch Industries” on political races. Of course, if you actually visit this page on the CRP website, the list runs below a disclaimer noting that it does not include certain Super PAC spending or most undisclosed dark money spending, the preferred route for the Koch brothers for decades. In fact, the CRP site notes that union spending might appear inflated since unions’ traditional PAC spending is coupled with outside Super PAC spending. For the purposes of this chart, union spending is inflated compared to the giving of companies like Koch or Super PAC donors like Sheldon Adelson.

For the last election, Koch PACs spent $4.9 million in disclosed contributions (figures that appear on the chart referenced by Strassel). But they also spent over $407 million on undisclosed campaign entities, which does not show up in the CRP chart.

Republic Report broke down the figures for the last election and found that Koch groups alone spent more than double the combined political spending (including to undisclosed group) for the top ten unions combined. The chart includes union spending on dark money Democratic groups and Koch spending on dark money groups like Americans for Prosperity.

This undisclosed campaign system is nothing new for the Koch brothers. In 1995 and 1996, Koch set up a shell company called Triad Management to spend millions in secret money to help the Republican Party. Of course, this type of spending never shows up in databases like the one cited by Strassel.

All NLRB-regulated unions, on the other hand, disclose every outside payment. Payments that cannot be found through the FEC can be found on a database maintained by the Labor Department. Individuals and corporations are under no such similar disclosure rules. The Koch money identified recently by The Washington Post, the $407 million, relates only to money filtered through foundations and nonprofits. The money Koch spends as a corporate entity, as it has in the past, may have gone unreported.

This post was originally published at RepublicReport.com

David Jolly, the Republican congressional candidate vying for the special election in Florida next week, has not only made a career out of lobbying. Records reviewed by Republic Report show that Jolly’s clients won millions of dollars in taxpayer earmarks from his old boss, the late Representative C.W. “Bill” Young (R-FL), an appropriator known for his lavish use of the earmarking process.

These earmarks contrast sharply with the claims made by Jolly that he did not build his business career through political connections to his former employer.

“I did not build my practice around Mr. Young, not in any stretch,” Jolly told the Tampa Bay Times.

Two of the firms that hired Jolly as a lobbyist—BayCare Health Systems and Alakai Defense Systems—won lucrative earmarks from Young while paying Jolly to influence the committee where Young was a senior member.

In 2009, BayCare Health Systems retained Jolly and another former Young staffer named Douglas Gregory. Later that year, Young secured a $1 million earmark for BayCare Health Systems for “facilities and equipment.”

From 2008 through the beginning of 2010, Alakai Defense Systems, a sensor technology company for the military, retained Jolly as a lobbyist. Records indicate that during this period, Young awarded Alakai with over $2 million worth of earmarks.

The Honest Leadership and Open Government Act prohibits certain former staffers in Congress from lobbying their former employers for a period of time. As The New York Times recently reported, many former staffers have flouted the “cooling off period” ban by taking advantage of an array of loopholes in the law.

Jolly, who left Young’s staff to join the lobbying firm Van Scoyoc Associates in January of 2007, became a lobbyist just before the ban came into effect.

“Yes, there are concerns raised when a former staffer appears to use his or her ties to his employer for personal gain,” says Jessica Levinson, associate professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. ”The cooling off period prohibition is designed to prevent people from using their connections in government to obtain unfair or preferential treatment or access for private clients.”

“The idea,” says Levinson, is that “everyone, regardless of whether or not they are represented by former staffers or officials, should get a fair shot to persuade their officials.”

]]>https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/david-jollys-clients-won-earmarks-his-old-bosses-bill-young/https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/obama-nominates-sopa-lobbyist-tpp-trade-post/Lee Fang,Lee Fang,Lee Fang,Lee Fang,Lee Fang,Lee Fang,Lee Fang,Lee Fang,Lee Fang,Lee Fang,Lee Fang,Lee Fang,Lee Fang,Lee Fang,Edward Hart,Lee Fang,Lee Fang,Lee Fang,Lee Fang,Lee Fang,Lee Fang,Lee Fang,Lee Fang,Lee Fang,Lee Fang,Lee Fang,Lee Fang,Lee Fang,Lee Fang,Lee Fang,Lee Fang,Lee Fang,Lee Fang,Lee Fang,Lee Fang,Lee Fang,Lee Fang,Lee FangFeb 27, 2014A new US trade representative is a former lobbyist pushing for limits on Internet freedom and draconian intellectual property policy.

This post was originally published at RepublicReport.org

For Chevron, the second-largest oil company in the country with $26.2 billion in annual profits, it helps to have friends in high places. With little fanfare, one of Chevron’s top lobbyists, Stephen Sayle, has become a senior staff member of the House Committee on Science, the standing congressional committee charged with “maintaining our scientific and technical leadership in the world.”

Throughout much of 2013, Sayle was the chief executive officer of Dow Lohnes Government Strategies, a lobbying firm retained by Chevron to influence Congress. For fees that total $320,000 a year, Sayle and his team lobbied on a range of energy-related issues, including implementation of EPA rules under the Clean Air Act, regulation of ozone standards, as well as “Congressional and agency oversight related to offshore oil, natural gas development and oil spills.”

Sayle’s ethics disclosure, obtained by Republic Report, shows that he was paid $500,000 by Chevron’s lobbying firm before taking his current gig atop the Science Committee.

In recent months, the House Science Committee has become a cudgel for the oil industry, issuing subpoenas and holding hearings to demonize efforts to improve the environment. Some of the work by the committee reflect the lobbying priorities of Chevron.

In December, the Science Committee, now chaired by Representative Lamar Smith (R-TX), held yet another hearing to try to discredit manmade global warming. In August, the committee issued the first subpoena in twenty-one years, demanding “all the raw data from a number of federally funded studies linking air pollution to disease.”

Though Chevron has gone to great lengths to advertise a lofty environmental record, the company continues to break air pollution laws while quietly backpedalling on its prior commitments to renewable energy. A Bloomberg News investigation reported that Chevron estimated that its biofuel investments would return only 5 percent in profits, a far cry from the 15 percent to which the oil giant is accustomed, and quietly moved to shelve renewable fuel units of the company. In California, Chevron is battling the newly created cap-and-trade system for carbon pollution. And in states across the country, Chevron has lobbied and provided financial support to a range of right-wing nonprofits dedicated to repealing carbon-cutting regulations, including the low-carbon fuel standard.

Earlier this year, Dow Lohnes’ lobbying practice merged with Levick, a public affairs firm.

(HT: Sheila Kaplan)

It was 4 o’clock in the afternoon, and I found myself hanging around the House-side entrance to the Capitol building, hoping to interview lawmakers during the protracted government shutdown in October. The members had been called by the Republican leadership to open just one portion of the government without authorizing funds for the Affordable Care Act, a partial solution that had rallied Democrats in opposition. As dusk settled in, I lingered to interview the representatives as they walked in and out of what everyone considered at this point to be a scene of political theater.

While I waited, a small crowd gathered, composed of men and women in business attire, creating something of a receiving line where they could exchange pleasantries with members of Congress as the latter made their way from their offices across Independence Avenue to cast a perfunctory vote. The city, with hundreds of thousands of federal workers sent home from the job, was far from dead. On Capitol Hill, the real financial engine of Washington, the selling of access and policy hummed along at full speed, and I was in the midst of it.

Many of the people assembled around me, I noticed, were former lawmakers and their associates. Former Senate majority leader Tom Daschle was there, along with officials from his firm DLA Piper, to escort a group of international attorneys into a meeting with lawmakers. Men who said they were with Alston & Bird, another law firm heavily involved in lobbying, convened a few feet away. A cluster of businessmen with the credit-rating firm Experian prepped their own series of meetings with congressional staff.

Behind me, I heard the distinctive croak of Zach Wamp, a former congressman who was busy talking up his new job to current members of Congress. He boasted that he is now working for Palantir, the controversial intelligence contractor. “I’m kind of overseeing their operations up here,” Wamp said when I asked what he does for Palantir. He ended the conversation abruptly when questioned about the scandals associated with the firm, which include allegations of spying on activists and other privacy violations.

I returned to a computer later that day and pulled up the lobbyist-registration database to run the few names I had managed to write down. In theory, lobbyists are required to register under the Lobbying Disclosure Act (LDA) to give the public some idea about who is attempting to influence the laws and regulations that govern us. To my surprise, however, Wamp and most of the others were nowhere to be found. (Palantir’s corporate counsel, Matt Long, would not comment on what Wamp does for the company.)

Daschle, a “policy adviser” to a range of corporate interests and a close confidant of many top Democrats, has become one of the most famous unregistered lobbyists in the city. In fact, his activities as a consigliere and go-between for business leaders and politicians, including President Obama, are so well known that among ethics watchdogs, the technicality in the law that allows lobbyists to evade registration has become known as the “Daschle Loophole.” 

Officially, Shrinking—Unofficially, Exploding

On paper, the lobbying industry is quickly disappearing. In January, records indicated that for the third straight year, overall spending on lobbying decreased. Lobbyists themselves continue to deregister in droves. In 2013, the number of registered lobbyists dipped to 12,281, the lowest number on file since 2002.

But experts say that lobbying isn’t dying; instead, it’s simply going underground. The problem, says American University professor James Thurber, who has studied congressional lobbying for more than thirty years, is that “most of what is going on in Washington is not covered” by the lobbyist-registration system. Thurber, who is currently advising the American Bar Association’s lobbying-reform task force, adds that his research suggests the true number of working lobbyists is closer to 100,000.

A loophole-ridden law, poor enforcement, the development of increasingly sophisticated strategies that enlist third-party validators and create faux-grassroots campaigns, along with an Obama administration executive order that gave many in the profession a disincentive to register—all of these forces have combined to produce a near-total collapse of the system that was designed to keep tabs on federal lobbying.

While the official figure puts the annual spending on lobbying at $3.2 billion in 2013, Thurber estimates that the industry brings in more than $9 billion a year. Other experts have made similar estimates, but no one is sure how large the industry has become. Lee Drutman, a lobbying expert at the Sunlight Foundation, says that at least twice as much is spent on lobbying as is officially reported.

Trade association documents, bankruptcy filings and reports from political consulting firms reviewed by The Nation show that many of America’s largest corporations have spent much more on lobbying than they’ve officially disclosed. In some cases, the quarterly registration system, used by the public and journalists, shows only one-tenth of the amount that firms spend to win favorable treatment by the federal government.

This explosion in spending on lobbying activities may not be visible in the lobbyist-registration system, but it is evident in Washington. The growth of the influence industry has created a new generation of millionaires while reshaping the region in its wake. The District of Columbia skyline, once dominated by monuments, is now dotted with cranes building some $5.5 billion in new development. The 14th Street and H Street corridors, formerly gritty sections of the city, are lined with more than forty new bars and restaurants. Census figures show that four of the five wealthiest counties in the country are now DC suburbs. In one of those counties—
Fairfax—high-end carmakers Tesla and Aston Martin have opened new showrooms to keep up with demand.

The new captains of the influence-peddling industry lobby openly and with no interest in registration, reaping enormous rewards. Tim Pawlenty, in his first two months as head of a lobbying association for financial companies that include Barclays and Wells Fargo, made more than double his annual $120,000 salary as governor of Minnesota. The self-described “Sam’s Club Republican” earns over $1.8 million a year working largely on banking regulations. He is not a registered lobbyist.

Chris Dodd, the former senator and Democratic presidential candidate who pledged not to become a lobbyist once he retired from Congress in 2010, made $3.3 million in his second year as chief of the movie industry lobby. (Dodd’s salary increased as he led the Motion Picture Association of America through a failed effort to pass an intellectual-property bill called the Stop Online Piracy Act, better known as SOPA.) Technically, however, Dodd hasn’t broken his pledge: though he seeks to win policy victories for his Hollywood-based members, he is not registered as a lobbyist.

Rather than using the L-word to describe what they do, many lobbyists prefer the more banal rubric of “government relations” or “government affairs.” Reflecting this trend, the American League of Lobbyists—a professional association for the industry—changed its name in November to the Association of Government Relations Professionals. And while registered lobbyists must report payments from clients, those ducking the system quietly bring in the biggest paydays.

Apple’s former vice president of “worldwide government affairs,” Catherine Novelli, earned over $7.5 million last year while helping the company deal with congressional inquiries about its alleged tax-dodging strategies—without registering as a lobbyist. Deborah Lee James, until recently the vice president for government affairs at SAIC, a major defense contractor, earned nearly $1 million in 2013 despite also being unregistered.

Luxury magazines such as The Washingtonian and Washington Life are filled with the latest displays of affluence by the district’s nonlobbying lobbyists. BP’s head of public affairs—another euphemism for influence peddling popular among unregistered lobbyists—recently spent $1.7 million for a six-bedroom house in the tony neighborhood of Spring Valley. Earlier this year, an executive from the Albright Stonebridge Group, a government-relations firm that influences policy on behalf of corporate interests without being registered under the LDA, shelled out $4.2 million for a home in Georgetown. 

Commercial real estate tells a similar story. A report by the real estate firm Cassidy Turley forecast “strong gains” for downtown office leases to the corporate lobbying and government-relations industries. In the weeks before fast-food workers earning less than $8 an hour began a wave of walkout strikes across the country in December, the National Restaurant Association, a lobbying group for eateries like McDonald’s and Burger King dedicated to blocking efforts to raise the minimum wage, moved into a swanky new office space on L Street to accommodate its 20 percent growth in staff operations. But even though the National Restaurant Association’s staff and spending have grown, the organization reported its lowest lobbying figures since 2007 on its latest forms.

Notably, despite what the registration forms say, Wall Street doesn’t seem to think that the lobbying business is drying up. The profits from the influence industry have aroused the interest of deep-pocketed investors. As a result,  the boutique firms and partnerships that made up America’s lobbying industry for the last two centuries are giving way to multibillion-dollar conglomerates.

The London-based WPP Group has been on a buying spree and now owns prominent lobbying and political-communication businesses like the Glover Park Group, Burson-Marsteller, Hill & Knowlton, the Dewey Square Group, Public Strategies Inc., the Prime Policy Group, and Quinn Gillespie & Associates. The company’s global earnings surged to $15.6 billion in 2012, thanks in part to the expansion of “lobbying and funding of lobbying” in America, according to a speech by WPP chief executive Martin Sorrell.

Qorvis Communications, an international lobbying firm based in Washington, was recently purchased by the Paris-based Publicis Groupe, which is in talks to merge with the Omnicom Group, another conglomerate that owns many government-affairs firms. Fleishman-Hillard, one of the dozens of Beltway public relations firms that work to influence policy without registering under the LDA, is an Omnicom Group company.

And why not keep buying? A November report from McKinsey & Company estimated that the “business value at stake from government and regulatory intervention” is about 30 percent of earnings for companies in most sectors. Simply put, government policies can mean the difference of billions of dollars for major companies, and spending on politics offers a superb payoff. A study from the University of Kansas found that companies lobbying for a tax holiday received a 22,000 percent return on the money they spent to influence the legislation.

“Money-Maddened Men Behind the Mask”

Step into the House clerk’s room in the basement of the Longworth House Office Building, and you’ll find an area with a television tuned to CNN, one or two staffers idling by their computers, and another feeding documents into a printer-scanner. On the other side of Capitol Hill is the office of the secretary of the Senate, a similarly small room filled with mostly idle staffers.

When Congress created the current lobbyist-registration system, they “handed over the responsibility for administering the law to these two offices,” says Timothy LaPira, an assistant professor at James Madison University who has written several papers on the failings of the current law.

The offices are largely clerical in nature. After lobbyists submit their registration or deregistration forms and quarterly statements, staffers are charged with making sure these filings show up in the database. “They have zero authority to actually investigate the person who fails to register to lobby,”  LaPira says. “They only look into cases where disclosures have already arrived in their offices and they suspect error.”

Enforcement authority ultimately lies with the United States Attorney’s Office for Washington, DC. In an interview, Keith Morgan, the deputy chief of that office, acknowledged that the Justice Department has largely pursued cases in which a registered lobbyist has failed to update a quarterly statement or fallen delinquent, and the House clerk or Senate secretary has spotted the error. Though there have been investigations, Morgan’s office has never prosecuted anyone for failing to register or for deregistering while continuing to lobby. “We have no ability to know if somebody doesn’t register unless some insider or a competitor comes and says, ‘We have reason to believe that this individual or this group is lobbying,’” Morgan says. To the best of his knowledge, even though Congress added criminal penalties for failing to disclose lobbying activities, there has not been one single case of criminal charges being filed under the law. 

Morgan’s office has limited capacity for pursuing violations of the LDA. There are four attorneys at the Justice Department charged with overseeing compliance with federal lobbying law, but their workload also includes healthcare and housing fraud, false claims and other kinds of cases. The only full-time employee for lobbying law is a paralegal who helps with the data entry on disclosures. “Quite frankly, there may be some instances where people who are lobbying should register,” Morgan says, adding that there have been “shifts in the lobbying industry to try to evade” registration.

LaPira confirms the situation: “The Department of Justice does not have the time, or resources, or political will, to really pursue any of these cases.” As a result, the American people are increasingly left in the dark about who’s calling the shots in their government. 

Finding a suitable way to enforce lobbying law has been a problem for decades, going back to the first registration system. While lobbying under false pretenses—using a front group or paying a professional to peddle influence on your behalf—was routinely banned by state law for much of the nineteenth century, this started to change in 1890, when Massachusetts (followed by other states) professionalized the role of lobbyists by instituting registration systems and other guidelines. Regulation on the federal level didn’t arrive until after a wave of congressional inquiries in the early twentieth century.

The first lobbyist-registration system was drafted by Senator Hugo Black of Alabama, a pugnacious New Deal Democrat who later became a Supreme Court justice. Black’s probes as head of the Special Committee to Investigate Lobbying Activities, which existed from 1935 through 1938, revealed a wide array of shady practices, from paying off newspaper editors for positive publicity to the creation of fake citizens’ organizations to generate phony grassroots petitions to Congress.

The most famous lobbying investigation of the New Deal was sparked by an incident involving Representative Denis Driscoll of Pennsylvania. Driscoll received 816 telegrams from a small town in his district, all opposed to legislation that would break up the utility trust companies. At the time, the utility market was highly concentrated in the hands of just a few wealthy businessmen. Thirteen holding companies accounted for 75 percent of the privately owned electric utility industry by 1932, a government report found, and the owners were hiking rates without fear of competition. President Franklin Roosevelt and his team favored a bill that would regulate and kill off the big holding companies. Then–House Speaker Sam Rayburn, reflecting on the ensuing legislative battle, called the trust companies “the most powerful lobby ever organized against any bill which ever came up in Congress.”

Driscoll attempted to track down some of the constituents responsible for the telegrams, to no avail; they didn’t seem to exist. Then Black took charge of the matter and began issuing blanket subpoenas to lobbyists, utility executives and even Western Union, the company that delivered the telegrams. The results were astounding. The utility companies had paid for over 250,000 telegrams to lawmakers, using names often taken at random from the local directories. The American Liberty League and other pressure groups like the Farmers’ Independence Council—all self-styled grassroots organizations that had come into existence in those years to oppose New Deal reforms—were found to be largely financed by a small group of wealthy families, including the du Ponts (who provided a third of the money) and members of the Morgan, Mellon and Rockefeller clans.

“There is no constitutional right on the part of any sordid and powerful group to present its views behind a mask concealing the identity of the group,” thundered Black, who began his political career as a prosecutor. He was particularly concerned about the use of front groups and deceptive tactics to conceal the identity of the true paymasters, whom he referred to as the “money-maddened men behind the mask.”

In 1935, in the weeks before Roosevelt signed the trustbusting bill to break up the electric utility monopoly, Black—who had written a provision in it requiring utility-industry lobbyists to register and disclose their activities—called for a more comprehensive system for the entire federal government. “Contrary to tradition, against the public morals and hostile to good government, the lobby has reached such a position of power that it threatens government itself,” he warned.

Black’s legislation easily passed the Senate, but a reconciled version of the bill failed the following year in the House, where it was shot down by a three-to-one margin. Both houses were decisively under Democratic control, but lobbyists held more sway in the lower chamber, and Democrats there were far more reluctant to pursue aggressive investigations against industry titans. As a result, even though a registration system for foreign lobbyists was created in 1938 after several scandals involving Nazi Germany’s use of agents to spread propaganda in the United States, it wasn’t until 1946 that a wide-ranging lobbyist-registration act, based on Black’s proposed legislation a decade earlier, was finally enacted.

However, the law—which applied only to those seeking to influence Congress and not the executive branch—provided such a vague definition of lobbying that it was challenged in the Supreme Court in 1954.

The Court voted to narrow the law so that it would apply only to those seeking direct communication with lawmakers. The Court also interpreted the law narrowly, so that only those organizations hired “principally” to influence legislation would have to register. And the lack of a clear enforcement mechanism—a problem that persists to this day—meant that few bothered to comply even with these narrowed requirements. Although the Watergate scandal sparked renewed interest in disclosure by lobbyists, it was not until the mid-’90s that Congress updated the system.

The impetus for reform came from a 1991 study by the General Accounting Office that revealed how porous the 1946 act had become. The study found that 10,000 lobbyists listed in an industry guidebook had failed to register. Of those who had, as many as 94 percent failed to complete their registration forms as required by law.

These days, the system is regulated largely through the Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995, which was signed by President Bill Clinton and revised substantially in 2007 to add new rules concerning lobbyist gifts in the wake of the Jack Abramoff scandal.

As he worked to become president, Barack Obama campaigned vigorously on a call to clamp down on the power of lobbyists. “We are up against the belief that it’s all right for lobbyists to dominate our government—that they are just part of the system in Washington,” he said in a speech in South Carolina. “But we know that the undue influence of lobbyists is part of the problem, and this election is our chance to say that we’re not going to let them stand in our way anymore.”

Obama’s only significant act to curb the influence of lobbyists is now seen as a failure. In fact, in many ways, he only made the problem worse.

In his first month in office, Obama signed an executive order stating that registered lobbyists would not be welcome in his administration. The administration quickly backpedaled, however, issuing a number of exemptions in the following years. But the larger effect was that many lobbyists simply deregistered, removing themselves from the lobbying-disclosure system and thereby pushing the influence-peddling profession more into the shadows. As Robert Gibbs, then Obama’s press secretary, explained glibly to Time magazine, when asked about reports of an Obama nominee engaging in lobbying activity: “If you’re not registered to lobby, you can’t be a lobbyist.” The clear implication was that the executive order would be narrowly enforced—and only against those who were registered under the LDA.

There’s good reason that the poster child for this gaping loophole in the lobbying law is Tom Daschle. The former Democratic senator for South Dakota first came to Washington campaigning as a humble citizen-legislator. Advertisements for his 1986 Senate run showed him cruising the city in a beat-up Pontiac. Over a shot of Daschle parking the car and walking toward the Capitol, the narrator intoned, “Isn’t it too bad the rest of Washington doesn’t understand that a penny saved is a penny earned?”

After being defeated for re-election in 2004, Daschle, like many retiring lawmakers, joined a law firm heavily invested in lobbying and became a “policy adviser” for a number of corporate clients. His salary at the firm rose to more than $2 million in the waning years of the Bush administration, in addition to the $2 million he made in 2008 advising a private equity firm.

While questions over Daschle’s taxes scuttled his 2008 nomination as secretary of health and human services, he continued to play a key role behind the scenes, visiting the White House, participating in Obama administration meetings, and working with legislators on healthcare policy. Now with the firm DLA Piper, Daschle refuses to register for his lobbying activities, though he counts major healthcare firms among his clients.

Daschle, like other unregistered lobbyists, could muster a legal defense for his failure to register. Because the LDA was designed to ensure that ordinary citizens petitioning their government would not be forced to register as lobbyists, the law has a three-pronged test to determine who should—a test that inadvertently allows Washington’s biggest influence peddlers to ignore the disclosure law. According to this test, a lobbyist is an individual who (1) earns at least $2,500 from lobbying over a three-month period; (2) has more than one lobbying contact for his services; and (3) spends at least 20 percent of his time during a three-month period making “lobbying contacts.” If a lobbyist can argue that just one of these statements doesn’t apply, he is not required to register. 

Lobbyists, moreover, are considered lobbyists only if they advocate on behalf of a certain position on legislation; if they’re simply gathering intelligence, they are not considered lobbyists under the law. 

Many unregistered lobbyists have argued that since they spend less than 20 percent, or one full day per week, engaged in contacting lawmakers, they should not have to register. Others have found equally creative justifications for not complying with the law. Newt Gingrich, during the last presidential campaign, memorably declared that he did not have to register as a lobbyist for the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation, which paid him about $1.7 million, because he worked for Freddie Mac as a “historian.” Gingrich also developed a healthcare institute that offered draft legislation, meetings with lawmakers and other benefits to its member corporations, including Astra-Zeneca and WellPoint. This institute, which even brought on Daschle for some events, did not register any of its advocacy as lobbying.

Gingrich’s “historian” claim was widely mocked. And ethics watchdogs, including Public Citizen’s Craig Holman, regard Daschle’s failure to disclose as a clear “flouting” of the law. But their behavior has become the norm.

Shining a Light on Shadow Lobbying

Last summer, in the wake of the disastrous collapse of the Rana Plaza factory in Bangladesh, which killed more than 1,100 people, a team from Daschle’s law firm, DLA Piper—including retired Senator George Mitchell and Charlie Scheeler, a former Senate aide—unveiled a plan to allow American retailers to skirt responsibility for future garment-factory disasters. While international advocates and some retailers with business in Bangladesh put forward a plan to create legally binding requirements for safety reforms, the Mitchell plan allows firms to pay only small upfront fees for upgrades, with no future commitments. Scheeler met with legislative aides in the Cannon House Office Building to generate support for the alternative agreement, which labor activists panned because it would not hold retail companies accountable for factory fires and other hazards.

Like Daschle, Scheeler and Mitchell are not registered lobbyists, so the officials they engaged as well as the wider public were not necessarily aware that their firm represents Gap, one of the largest retailers identified with the Rana Plaza collapse, and one of the firms that would have been affected by the more stringent safety agreement.

As common as the practice is, such clear-cut examples of unregistered influence peddling are actually hard to come by given that the work is done, by and large, behind closed doors. One way that such information does come to light is through bankruptcy proceedings—as occurred when one company was forced to reveal all of its creditors in May 2012.

LightSquared, a startup that hoped to compete with AT&T and Verizon in the cellphone business, retained a staggering seventeen different lobbying firms as it pressed the Federal Communications Commission for an exemption that would allow it to use GPS signals to run a nationwide broadband cellphone service. After failing to obtain a favorable ruling from the FCC, LightSquared began lobbying the Defense Department for a “spectrum swap” to use airwaves allocated to the military. As all avenues began to close, the company declared bankruptcy.

Though LightSquared had disclosed a large number of registered lobbyists—including seven former members of Congress—the company’s bankruptcy proceedings revealed an even greater influence game.

One of LightSquared’s creditors was the Chertoff Group, a consulting firm run by former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff. LightSquared also owed money to Portico Policy Advisors, a company founded by Jim Doyle, a former Clinton administration aide who now advises businesses on a “range of policy, regulatory and communications issues,” according to his website. Doyle is the co-founder of Business Forward, a trade association that routinely organizes meetings with White House officials and business leaders. Neither the Chertoff Group nor Portico Policy Advisors is registered as a lobbying firm.

LightSquared’s influence team extended even to Stanley McChrystal, the former commander in charge of military operations in Afghanistan. After McChrystal retired following a Rolling Stone story that exposed his dim view of senior administration officials, he founded the McChrystal Group, an Alexandria, Virginia–based consulting firm. In January 2012, as LightSquared desperately sought to acquire spectrum, representatives from McChrystal’s firm contacted the Defense Department’s mid-Atlantic area frequency coordinator to discuss the deal. The McChrystal Group was interested in the spectrum reserved for test aircraft and weapons systems, according to an account published by GPS World, a trade publication.

The McChrystal Group, which is not registered as a lobbying firm, initially denied ever contacting the Defense Department on the spectrum deal. “We purposefully have not been doing those types of things, and lobbying is among those practices better left to other people and has never been part of our business plan or focus,” said Duncan Boothby, a senior aide to McChrystal. Boothby said the firm’s work on behalf of LightSquared related only to an “initial assessment,” in which the McChrystal Group would “come in and present to them what services we could provide, where we saw their strategic problems.” LightSquared bankruptcy documents show $70,000 in payments to the McChrystal Group.

Days after our initial interview, Boothby called to say that the McChrystal Group had indeed contacted the Defense Department on behalf of LightSquared, yet stressed that it had merely sought to collect information rather than advocate a certain position—a key difference that would excuse the company from having to register as a lobbying firm.  

“Outside” Lobbying: Outside the Law

One of the biggest problems with lobbyist registration is that the LDA was never intended to cover so-called “outside lobbying.” Like previous iterations of the law, the current system does nothing to regulate the fake grassroots groups that enraged Senator Black, or the surrogate think tanks and public relations gimmicks used to corral popular support for special-interest legislative campaigns. Many lobbying businesses offer a full range of capabilities that fall well outside the LDA’s definition of lobbying.

Take, for example, the pressure brought by banks against a provision of the Dodd-Frank law that capped the amount they could charge retailers for credit card transactions. A group of banks affected by the "swipe fee" reform financed an organization called the Electronic Payments Coalition to persuade Congress to roll back the cap. In 2011, the year the group came close to achieving its goal in the Senate, the Electronic Payments Coalition officially reported spending exactly $1 million on federal lobbying.

In reality, the bank-financed group spent about $17 million to influence lawmakers that year, according to tax forms filed with the IRS months after its legislative effort failed. The unreported $16 million in advocacy expenses covered policy advisers, a public relations company in DC and at least one telemarketing firm. One lobbyist helping to lead the campaign, a former Democratic congressional staffer named Jeffrey Tassey, was paid $882,406, though the Electronic Payments Coalition disclosed only $400,000 in the registration forms filed with officials.

The banks aren’t alone. Virtually every significant corporate interest group spends millions of dollars every year on policy advocacy that isn’t disclosed as lobbying. Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, Honeywell, Lockheed Martin, GE Aviation and other large defense contractors, for example, pooled their money through a trade group, the Aerospace Industries Association (AIA), to hire a number of outside consultants to push back against so-called sequestration cuts in the defense budget.

Since 2011, the defense contractors have paid a political consulting firm called the Law Media Group to help undo military budget cuts. “I invite you to make your voice heard as part of this industry effort through your own contacts with your member of Congress, your senators and President Obama,” wrote Wesley Bush, chief executive of Northrop Grumman, in a letter calling on subcontractors to visit a website called Second to None, a project of the AIA that the Law Media Group was promoting.

The Law Media Group never registered as a lobbying firm, though the defense firms paid it at least $1,277,466 for the influence campaign. “While we’re no longer working with AIA, we did press/communications work on the initial rollout of AIA’s ‘Second to None’ campaign, but not any kind of lobbying or Hill outreach,” the Law Media Group’s Tony Park said in an e-mail explaining why his firm never disclosed its activities under the lobbyist-registration system.

Other examples abound. News Corporation, CBS, Gannett Broadcasting and other media companies, through a trade group, disclosed only $100,000 in lobbying payments to a firm called Mercury Public Affairs in 2012. In fact, according to documents obtained by The Nation, the amount paid by the broadcasters to Mercury, which contacted lawmakers on spectrum and tax issues, was closer to $510,000. Similarly, a group of fracking companies that year retained the lobbying firm Glover Park Group for $2.9 million. But the contract with Glover Park was never disclosed.

Mercury Public Affairs and the Glover Park Group did not respond to requests for comment.

Edelman, a public relations firm that helps businesses develop grassroots support for their legislative and regulatory policies in Washington, has also racked up lucrative contracts. According to documents obtained by The Nation, the firm was retained by the grocery industry ($741,625), the oil refinery industry ($638,494), a group of mining companies ($1,371,044), the electric utility industry ($683,183), the National Association of Manufacturers ($1,080,87), and the American Petroleum Institute ($51,917,692). On behalf of the API, an oil and gas industry lobby, Edelman managed multiple websites and online advertising efforts urging officials to approve the Keystone XL pipeline, support tax deductions for the oil industry, and expand access for drilling on public lands.

Despite this seemingly obvious lobbying activity, Edelman has not been registered as a lobbying firm since 2006. The so-called “grassroots advocacy” that the firm specializes in falls outside the statutory definition in the Lobbying Disclosure Act.

Even those who claim to engage only in public relations do participate, in some cases, in direct meetings. One such example is Anita Dunn, the former White House communications director and current informal adviser to the Obama administration. After leaving the administration in 2009, she joined SKDKnickerbocker, a “political consulting” firm, taking on corporate accounts to influence Obama initiatives. SKDKnickerbocker worked to curb Michelle Obama’s obesity initiative on behalf of a group of food marketing companies; to weaken Education Department regulations on behalf of a for-profit college; and the firm is currently working on behalf of TransCanada to get the Keystone XL pipeline approved.

“I work with some corporations, because the fact of the matter is, we’re in a democracy, and there’s a dialogue, and people have a right to be heard,” Dunn says in defense of these efforts. SKDKnickerbocker has never registered as a lobbying firm. The New York Times reported that despite its claims to engage only in public relations, SKDKnickerbocker has contacted Obama administration officials on behalf of its clients.

The Obama administration’s greatest defeat, many argue, was the president’s failure to pass a comprehensive law addressing climate change during his first two years in office, when the Democrats had control of both houses of Congress. Coal and coal-powered utility companies, fearing a loss in profits resulting from the bill, financed a group called the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE, pronounced “Ace”) to influence the debate.

After a critical vote in the House of Representatives in 2009, in which the climate bill just barely passed, a Democratic lawmaker from Virginia discovered that many of the letters he had received from supposed constituents asking him to oppose the bill had been forged. The letters appeared to come from local chapters of the American Association of University Women, the NAACP and other organizations—but in fact they were written by Bonner & Associates, a political consulting firm and subcontractor for ACCCE. At least two other Democratic lawmakers, Kathy Dahlkemper and Chris Carney, both from Pennsylvania, received forged letters as well.

ACCCE did disclose $2.2 million in lobbying spending as the House took up President Obama’s climate bill in 2009. Tax forms filed with the IRS, however, show that the group in fact spent $28,353,630 in advocacy that year. The work with Bonner & Associates never had to be disclosed as lobbying.

Unlike Hugo Black with his multiyear investigation in the 1930s, which triggered the first federal lobbying reforms, Democratic legislators in recent years have done little to confront the problem. Black issued subpoenas and had his staff travel the country to interview those involved and to explore the depths of the industry’s deception. But in 2009, House Democrats held a single hearing and then largely dismissed the issue, with little consequence to those involved. One ACCCE representative claimed under oath that his group did not oppose the climate bill—a claim easily refutable through a simple Google search. The corporate executives who financed the group were not compelled to testify, and there were no legal penalties for those involved in the fake letter campaign. With industry organizations and their affiliates spreading confusion about the bill and even the science underpinning anthropogenic climate change, the legislation later collapsed and died in the Senate, dooming prospects for reform.

After a conservative-led revolt against the Farm Bill, a five-year congressional funding program for agricultural and hunger programs, a deal will reportedly reach the president’s desk on Friday. The final iteration of the bill cuts $8 billion from food stamps, a key demand made by Americans for Prosperity, which aired advertisements and organized opposition to the initial Farm Bill because of the supposed waste of providing food assistance to needy families. Americans for Prosperity is controlled by the billionaire Koch brothers and their cohort. Koch groups claimed the Farm Bill serves “special interests and powerful corporations” over the taxpayers.

Yet, the final funding package contains a number of giveaways that benefit Koch Industries’ bottom line:

• Biomass Subsidies: The Farm Bill preserves $881 million in mandatory spending for biomass energy, a program that Koch Industries’ timber subsidiary Georgia-Pacific has used to to extract government subsidies. Georgia-Pacific applied and qualified for the Biomass Crop Assistance Program for its facilities in Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, Oregon and Florida. Lobbying reports from Koch Industries show that the company has pressured Congress on the Farm Bill, specifically on the BCAP program. Records also show that Koch Industries executive Deborah Baker asked Department of Agriculture officials to expand BCAP forestry eligibility.

• New Clean Water Act Exemption: The Farm Bill enacts a measure that ensures runoff of pesticides and other chemicals from forestry sites may not be regulated under the Clean Water Act as industrial pollution. The Farm Bill includes an amendment that would define the “EPA’s treatment of forestry operations as non-point sources of pollution under the Clean Water Act.” A bipartisan group of legislators sponsored the forestry amendment, which Wild Oregon warns will overturn “a recent court ruling that found that pollution originating from active logging roads be treated similarly to other industrial activities.” The group says the amendment poses “a serious risk not just to the [Nestucca River], but to countless other rivers and streams in Oregon that have been damaged by poor logging and road building practices.” Koch Industries’ Georgia-Pacific signed on with other companies in lobbying for this amendment to the Farm Bill.

Koch Industries was also joined by other energy and timber corporations in lobbying for the expansion of biomass energy programs. Timber companies and their trade associations, particularly in the Pacific Northwest, came together to demand the Clean Water Act exemption.

Recipients of food stamps, also known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), had few resources to influence Congress. Although several grocery and convenient store industry groups pushed back against cuts on SNAP, defenders of food stamps were largely outgunned during the debate. Anti-poverty activists say the deep cuts in the food stamp program will amount to a $90 monthly reduction for many families.

Before the State Department released its controversial Environmental Impact Study last week, a consulting firm called IHS CERA primed the news media by releasing its own study last year claiming that the Keystone XL wouldn’t make a substantial difference in emissions. The report was released as an “independent” study. TheNation.com filed a Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act request to the Alberta government, and found that taxpayers in Canada paid IHS CERA hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The heavily redacted contract, a version of which can be found here, provides $325,000 from the government of Alberta to IHS CERA. In addition, public budget documents from Alberta reveal that taxpayers in Canada have provided IHS with more than $545,426 in payments over the last year for energy-related work.

The Alberta government has been one of the most aggressive proponents of the pipeline. Last year, Alberta retained two DC lobbying firms with strong ties to Secretary of State John Kerry, Mehlman Vogel Castagnetti and Rasky Baerlein Strategic Communications, to push for speedy approval of the Keystone XL.

Echoing the State Department EIS released last week, the IHS CERA claimed that even without the Keystone XL, Canadian oil sands would be developed by other means. “Even if the Keystone XL pipeline does not move forward, we do not expect a material change to oil sands production growth,” claims the authors.

However, assessments of the market by Toronto-Dominion Bank, Royal Bank of Canada, Deloitte, Goldman Sachs and other leading financial analysts have found that the Keystone XL is critical for the development of the high-carbon oil sands market.

Notably, even Jackie Forrest, one of the co-authors of the 2013 IHS CERA report, claimed previously that without the Keystone XL, oil sands development “could stall for lack of new demand.” Contradicting her most recent report, Forrest told the Oil & Gas Journal that, “based on our view of growth in Canadian oil sands and tight oil production, over the next five years North America will need both the Keystone XL and the Enbridge projects in order to create enough takeaway capacity to prevent bottlenecks.”

As critics have noted, the State Department’s EIS was also marred by a serious conflict of interest. The private firm tapped to conduct the study, ERM, misled the State Department by obscuring its financial ties to TransCanada, the largest beneficiary of the Keystone XL pipeline.

President Obama could take immediate steps to begin to clean up the dark money problem in American politics. He could, for instance, issue an executive order requiring all government contractors to disclose their contributions to 501(c) advocacy groups, a decision that would impact hundreds of major firms.

Instead, the administration’s response to the flood of dark money in recent elections is a set of new IRS regulations aimed only at addressing some activity taken by 501(c)(4) “issue advocacy” groups. The new rules restrict “participation or intervention in political campaigns on behalf of or in opposition to any candidate for public office.” The rules also restrict C4 organizations from engaging in so-called “candidate-related” communications.

Though put forth with purportedly good intentions, this proposed rule would do little to deter powerful individuals or large companies from engaging in limitless dark money electioneering. The $400 million in undisclosed campaign money spent by the Koch network in 2012, revealed recently by Robert Maguire of the Center for Responsive Politics and Matea Gold of The Washington Post, showed that deep-pocketed donors have been quick to set up 501(c)(6) trade associations, which would not even be impacted by the rules as they stand now. Like 501(c)(4) issue advocacy organizations, 501(c)(6) trade groups may take unlimited donations and engage in unrestricted partisan or election activity. Trade groups are often formed by industry associations or coalitions of like-minded businesses. One of the largest of the new Koch groups, called Freedom Partners, is a 501(c)(6) trade association.

As a result of the Citizens United Supreme Court decision, 501(c)(6) trade associations have been front and center in coordinating corporate-funded, fully undisclosed, partisan advocacy. Organizations such as the US Chamber of Commerce and the American Petroleum Institute have taken advantage of the new election landscape to provide corporations with a veil of secrecy in influencing American elections. And the proposed regulations on 501(c)(4) organizations would do nothing to change that.

Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that a candidate who feels strongly about regulating the fossil fuel industry and addressing climate change ran for US Senate. In response, oil company X sought to prevent this candidate from being elected, but did not want the negative publicity associated with dumping millions of dollars into an election. Oil company X could simply route the money through a 501(c)(6) trade group, like the US Chamber of Commerce or the National Federation of Independent Businesses, which could then air the negative campaign advertisement independently or through another third party. The voter would have no idea where the money was coming from.

While certain organizations have been created or expanded in the last two election cycles to exploit the current system for 501(c)(4) nonprofits, namely groups like Americans for Prosperity, Crossroads GPS and, on the Democratic side, Priorities USA, most 501(c)(4) nonprofits are community groups that have little resources and exist to promote genuine nonpartisan advocacy.

Under the administration’s new rule, the small 501(c)(4) groups would probably be hurt the most, and at least in the short term, civic engagement will take a hit. The “candidate-related” communications banned in the new rules include nonpartisan voter registration and “get-out-the-vote” drives.

To critics, the rule will reduce the role of activists (like the League of Women Voters) while allowing the wealthy to simply change tax status and continue operating in the dark. “The big players,” Alliance for Justice president Nan Aron wrote, “will hire lawyers and accountants to help them avoid the rules.” Moving to better police the activities of political nonprofits is desperately needed. But any change should aim to level the playing field and promote transparency for all.

Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) has railed against immigration reform all year, becoming one of the most vocal opponents of the legislation that passed the Senate in June. In arguing against the bill, Cruz charges regularly that proponents of reform are merely playing politics. “It is designed for it to sail through the Senate and then crash in the House to let the president go and campaign in 2014 on this issue,” he said.

In an interview that aired earlier this month, Cruz admitted that he is the one using the livelihood of millions of undocumented immigrants for partisan gain.

Speaking with Houston-based radio host Michael Berry, Cruz said he hopes that Speaker John Boehner will not take on immigration reform next year. Doing so, Cruz argued, would diminish the “incredible opportunity to retake the Senate in 2014.” Cruz emphasized that he is focused on winning the Senate majority from Democrats, and said passing immigration reform legislation would be the “number one thing Republicans could do to mess that up.”

Cruz also said comprehensive immigration would amount to “kicking millions of Americans in the teeth.” During the chat, the freshman senator did not offer any concrete policy solutions, noting only that those seeking to pass legislation “refuse to stand for principle.” The Senate version of the bill includes a pathway to citizenship of over 13 years, with many barriers and fines, along with over $50 billion of increased border security.

Transcript below:

MICHAEL BERRY: Amnesty, illegal immigration, an immigration reform plan. We’re hearing that Boehner has punted that until after the Republican primary to save the squish Republicans from Tea Party challenges. True?

TED CRUZ: You know, I don’t know. I certainly hope the reports that you and I are both reading are not true. You know I think we’ve got an incredible opportunity to retake the Senate in 2014, to retire Harry Reid as Majority Leader. And the number one thing Republicans could do to mess that up is to refuse to stand for principle. And if the House turns around and passes a giant amnesty deal that doesn’t secure the border and grants amnesty, they might as well go and put “Harry Reid for Majority Leader” bumper stickers on the backs of their cars because it would be kicking conservatives, kicking the Tea Party, kicking millions of Americans in the teeth to make that same mistake again, so I sure hope they don’t do it.

BERRY: I think you’re right.

Ted Mitchell, the chief executive of the NewSchools Venture Fund, was nominated in October by President Obama to become the Under Secretary of the Department of Education.

As the administration continues to reshuffle its team, and confront new regulatory challenges, some view Mitchell’s nomination as a move towards greater privatization. In the coming months, the Department of Education will release “gainful employment” rules to rein in for-profit colleges, an experiment in proprietary education that many see as an unmitigated disaster.

As head of the NewSchools Venture Fund, Mitchell oversees investments in education technology start-ups. In July, Zynga, the creators of FarmVille, provided $1 million to Mitchell’s group to boost education gaming companies. Mitchell’s NewSchool Venture Fund also reportedly partners with Pearson, the education mega-corporation that owns a number of testing and textbook companies, along with one prominent for-profit virtual charter school, Connections Academy.

Jeff Bryant, a senior fellow with the Campaign for America’s Future, says it seems likely that Mitichell will “advocate for more federal promotion of online learning, ‘blended’ models of instruction, ‘adaptive learning’ systems, and public-private partnerships involving education technology.”

Mitchell did not respond to TheNation.com’s  request for comment*.

His ethics disclosure form shows that he was paid $735,300 for his role at NewSchools, which is organized as a non-profit. In recent years, he has served or is currently serving as a director to New Leaders, Khan Academy, California Education Partners, Teach Channel, ConnectED, Hameetman Foundation, the Alliance for College-Ready Public Schools, Silicon Schools, Children Now, Bellwether Partners, Pivot Learning Partners, EnCorps Teacher Training Program, the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, and the Green DOT Public Schools.

In addition, Mitchell serves as an adviser to Salmon River Capital, a venture capital firm that specializes in education companies. Mitchell sits on the board of Parchment, an academic transcript start-up that is among Salmon River Capital’s portfolio.

Salmon River Capital helped create one of the biggest names in for-profit secondary education, Capella University. “As a foundational investor and director, [Salmon River Capital’s] Josh Lewis made invaluable contributions to Capella’s success. From leading our landmark financing in 2000, when Capella was a $10 million business operating in a difficult environment, through a successful 2006 IPO and beyond, he proved a great partner who kept every commitment he made,” reads a statement from Steve Shank, founder of Capella.

The Minnesota-based Capella heavily recruits veterans and has received $53.1 million from the GI Bill in the past four years. The Minnesota attorney general is currently investigating several unnamed for-profit colleges in her state. 

Numerous investigations have shown that for-profit colleges have targeted veterans with deceptive recruiting tactics. “Some for-profits have cleaned out students’ military benefits while also signing them up for thousands of dollars in loans without their knowledge. A vet who enrolled at the largely online Ashford University after being told the GI Bill would cover his tuition ended up owing the school $11,000,” reported Mother Jones.

But the companies are not without some winners: Bloomberg News reported in 2010 that executives at for-profit colleges have raked in $2 billion in compensation.

How the Department of Education moves forward in 2014 with its own set of regulations on for-profit colleges—an industry criticized for burdening a generation with a lifetime of debt—is yet to be determined. Currently, lobbyists for the largest for-profit colleges, including Apollo (University of Phoenix), Education Management Corporation (The Art Institutes), Kaplan, ITT Tech, Career Education Corporation and Corinthian Colleges, are lobbying aggressively to make sure that the rules will not curb the $38 billion in taxpayer money now enjoyed by the industry. The campaign extends to think tanks, politicians and other sources of influence in Washington.

In a presentation posted online by WhiteBoard Advisors, a DC consulting firm that is owned by Grayling, a lobbying corporation that represents for-profit colleges, posed a number of questions to education experts about what Mitchell’s nomination means for gainful employment regulations.

One slide is titled, “Insider Insights: What, if anything, does Mitchell’s selection mean for the gainful employment regulation process?” Many responses are ambiguous, even dismissive if Mitchell can play a role. “Nothing, that’s controlled by James Kvaal, period. That Ted doesn’t think for‐profit providers should be summarily executed means he’s not going to be included in conversations,” reads one anonymous insider’s view.

Others are more optimistic that he will weaken regulations on the for-profit college industry: “Hopefully he will moderate it and be more supportive of private providers.” Some education privatization supporters have been even more candid. Rick Hess, an outspoken supporter of privatization at the American Enterprise Institute, tweeted: “Ted Mitchell appt as ED Under Sec is bad news for gainful employment fanatics.”

Update: After publication of this blog post, Mitchell e-mailed a statement noting that he could not comment on gainful employmen regulations because he is in the "midst of a confirmation process." He added that he is on "an informal advisory Board for Salmon" and that Pearson sponsored a summit for his organization in May. 

Students and veterans helped deliver big campaign victories for the Democratic Party in recent elections. Now, some Democratic lawmakers are thanking them by trying to ensure that predatory businesses can rip them off and saddle them with a lifetime of debt.

TheNation.com has learned that a small group of House Democrats, led by Representatives Rob Andrews of New Jersey and Alcee Hastings of Florida, are organizing an effort within the caucus to protect the for-profit career college industry from any meaningful regulation. The two congressmen are among the largest recipients of campaign cash from the industry. Campaign finance data compiled by TheNation.com show Hastings has received $54,500, and Andrews $78,547, from for-profit college executives and political committees.

Unlike non-profit private or public universities, proprietary career colleges exist to make money; lot's of it. For-profit colleges take in some $33 billion in taxpayer money annually, funds designed to help veterans and students afford college. For many critics, the entire industry is built upon fraud. Multiple investigations show systematic deception in the industry — recruiters lying to students about job placement rates, students graduating with incredibly high debt with few employment prospects, and marketing campaigns that obscure what is often a low-quality education.

Students that have gone to for-profit colleges are not only more likely graduate with high levels of debt — for-profit students hold $31,190 dollars in debt on average, compared to $17,040 at private, nonprofit institutions and $7,960 at public colleges — they are also three times as likely to default on their loans.

As Adam Weinstein reported for Mother Jones, for-profit colleges have also targeted returning soldiers to take advantage of their GI benefits. “Some for-profits have cleaned out students' military benefits while also signing them up for thousands of dollars in loans without their knowledge. A vet who enrolled at the largely online Ashford University after being told the GI Bill would cover his tuition ended up owing the school $11,000,” Weinstein noted.

In 2010, the Department of Education proposed modest rules to mandate that taxpayer money would only go to for-profit schools that could demonstrate that a reasonable number of their students were able to gain jobs after graduation. An intense lobbying effort followed. Career colleges, including the University of Phoenix, Kaplan Higher Education, Devry Inc., The Art Institute (owned by Education Management Corporation), Corinthian Colleges, Grand Canyon University, among others, pushed back through a sophisticated influence campaign. Think tanks and other NGOs were co-opted by industry, dozens of lobbyists were hired, and for-profit colleges pumped campaign contributions into the accounts of lawmakers opposed to the rule. The industry also flooded the department with astroturfed letters. The Obama Administration finally issued a much-watered down version of the rule. Then, the for-profit colleges sued and persuaded a judge to strike it down.

This year, the Obama Administration has promised to re-propose the regulation, and today will reconvene a meeting with stakeholders to move forward with a new version of the “gainful employment&rdquot; rule. During debate over the last version of the rule, virtually every House Republican, joined by a number of Democrats, worked to defeat the regulation. The process seems to be repeating itself this year, with Andrews and Hastings circulating a “Dear Colleague” letter asking other House Democrats to sign a document asking the administration to back down. The letter, obtained in draft form by by TheNation.com, asks lawmakers to contact David Opong-Wadee, a staffer to Hastings, if they would like to join the anti-gainful employment regulation group.

Notably, the Association for Private Sector Colleges and Universities, a trade association for the industry, has given only to two House Democrats in the last three months: Hastings and Andrews.

]]>https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/two-house-democrats-lead-effort-protect-profit-colleges-betraying-students-and-vets/https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/third-way-majority-our-financial-support-wall-street-business-executives/Lee Fang,Lee Fang,Lee Fang,Lee Fang,Lee Fang,Lee Fang,Lee Fang,Lee Fang,Lee Fang,Lee Fang,Lee Fang,Lee Fang,Lee Fang,Lee Fang,Edward Hart,Lee Fang,Lee Fang,Lee Fang,Lee Fang,Lee Fang,Lee Fang,Lee Fang,Lee Fang,Lee Fang,Lee Fang,Lee Fang,Lee Fang,Lee Fang,Lee Fang,Lee Fang,Lee Fang,Lee Fang,Lee Fang,Lee Fang,Lee Fang,Lee Fang,Lee Fang,Lee Fang,Lee Fang,Lee Fang,Lee Fang,Lee Fang,Lee Fang,Lee Fang,Lee Fang,Lee Fang,Lee FangDec 11, 2013

If Third Way’s attacks on Senator Elizabeth Warren make the group sound like a stalking horse for Wall Street executives, there might be a reason for that.

At a demonstration today outside the think tank’s downtown DC office, Third Way senior vice president Matt Bennett conceded to Progressive Change Campaign Committee (PCCC) co-founder Adam Green that “the majority” of Third Way’s donor support comes from the group’s board of trustees, most of whom are from the finance sector.

As TheNation.com and others have pointed out, the majority of Third Way’s trustees are finance industry executives, many of whom might have a vested interest in using a surrogate to attack Warren. Warren, whom Time magazine calls the “new sheriff of Wall Street,” has demanded greater regulation of the industry. Many of the trustees listed on the Third Way website hail from an assortment of private equity firms and other investment businesses. Others work indirectly, like Third Way trustee Thurgood Marshall Jr., whose professional website at the public affairs firm Bingham Consulting lists his work as “government relations” on issues concerning, among others, “banking regulations.”

Bennett explained to Green that the majority of donors to his group “write us personal checks,” so much of the Wall Street money to Third Way comes from individuals, not institutions. To be sure, Third Way also counts on other corporate donors. As we’ve reported, many companies maintain ties to Third Way, which was formed as a bulwark against economic progressivism within the Democratic Party, to advance their interests in Washington. For instance, both Qualcomm and Humana list their donations to Third Way as part of each company’s lobbying budget.

Third Way sparked the demonstration by authoring an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal last week titled “Economic Populism is a Dead End of Democrats.” Third Way’s Jon Cowan and Jim Kessler explicitly called out Warren’s proposals for expanding Social Security through taxes on higher income individuals. Though polls show rampant support for these policies, many critics believe there were ulterior motives for the opinion column. Expanding Social Security would not only end up expanding benefits for seniors, but would also force Third Way’s trustees to pay slightly more in taxes.

A transcript of the exchange is below:

GREEN: If you included the financial industry sector people, as individuals on your board, what percent would be Wall Street money?

BENNETT: Here’s the thing about defining Wall Street money. As we’ve said, our major donors are on our website. Many of them are in the finance sector, they write us personal checks. This is not from their institutions, many of them are retired or have left their institutions, in fact most of them. That is the majority of our financial support, coming from trustees.

GREEN: Is there a ball park? A percentage?

BENNETT: I’m not going to get into that.

There’s a lot of news this week on the American Legislative Exchange Council and the related network of state-based think tanks, the State Policy Network.

Almost a year ago, when I was at a small upstart blog called Republic Report, we first sent a letter to corporations involved with ALEC, asking them to leave the organization, given its role in crafting the Stand Your Ground law in Florida. The Guardian unveiled a trove of documents revealing that ALEC has suffered tremendously from the negative press around those efforts, which involved a group of left-of-center organizations, including the Center for Media and Democracy and Color of Change. Many businesses actually did leave ALEC.

While ALEC seems down, they’re not out. According to the documents obtained by The Guardian, ALEC and its allied organization, SPN, have redoubled their efforts to expand and find new funding streams. The documents suggest fundraising off of gambling efforts, efforts to push worker retirement accounts into dubious 401(k)-style plans, and other corporate giveaways that ALEC and SPN can spin into legislative templates and advocacy. Specific corporations and lobbying organizations are listed as prospective donors. The money just never stops.

This is the inherent difference between right-leaning organizations and their counterparts on the left. Large corporations view their right-wing giving as a strong return on investment. For almost every major conservative issue campaign, at least on economic policy, the wealthy and powerful ultimately benefit, meaning their donations to groups like ALEC and their cohorts are well-served. If corporate donors give to the left, as they sometimes do, they risk higher taxes, more empowered workers and less influence over elections. So it should be no surprise the the vast majority of corporate wealth in politics flows to the right and far right.

This pattern has repeated itself for many decades, though it has accelerated in recent years. During the course of my research on how the conservative movement rebuilt itself in the aftermath of the 2008 elections, I found myself digging through many historical files that show this dynamic repeating itself like an endless feedback loop.

On the occasion of Nelson Mandela’s passing this week, it is worth remembering that many American conservative organizations opposed his struggle by fighting against sanctions and divestment from the apartheid regime that oppressed him.

For ALEC, that meant partnering with corporations that faced calls for South African divestment and creating template legislation to block the pro-Mandela movement.

Below is a camera phone picture of one Legislative Update from ALEC describing its campaign in the 1980s to block South African divestment. During this period, ALEC’s corporate membership included a number of businesses with interests in South Africa, including IBM:

For more on how the recent history of the conservative movement, including the role of ALEC and SPN, my book The Machine: A Field Guide the Resurgent Right delves much deeper. Also, The Nation has a thorough investigation of SPN/ALEC in the April 15 edition, which you can find here.

Allison Kilkenny takes a closer look at the effects of Chicago school closures.

If Third Way is truly concerned about electing Democrats, they chose a strange fundraising firm to partner with.

When Third Way’s president and senior vice president of policy published a Wall Street Journal opinion piece this week decrying the economic positions of Bill de Blasio and Elizabeth Warren, namely, taxing the rich and expanding entitlement programs, their arguments rested on (weak) grounds that such ideas are bad for Democratic Party electoral prospects.

Earlier this week, TheNation.com obtained the latest disclosure forms for Third Way and reported that the think tank relies on a corporate lobbying firm called Peck, Madigan & Jones—a company featured by The Hill as among the “Top Lobbyists” of 2013—to raise more than half a million dollars a year. What makes Peck, Madigan & Jones such a top player on K Street?

Peck, Madigan & Jones’s largest client is the US Chamber of Commerce, a corporate trade group that represents large corporations like AIG, Bank of America and Dow Chemical. The Chamber, through its financial policy and legal affiliates, has paid Peck, Madigan & Jones $570,000 this year alone.

While the Third Way op-ed made a point of claiming that progressive economic policies wouldn’t play well with voters in Colorado, in 2008, their fundraisers’ client ran nasty attack ads against a Third Way leader in the state. When Third Way co-chair Senator Mark Udall (D-CO) first ran for the Senate, the US Chamber sponsored an advertisement against him on energy policy, declaring, “Every time he’s blocked American energy production, he’s made the tyrants and sheiks happy. But we’ve paid the price.”

Last year, Third Way co-chair Senator Claire McCaskill (D-MO) faced a barrage of attacks from the Chamber. One ad during the election last year instructed viewers, “Call Claire McCaskill. Tell her Missouri doesn’t need government-run health care. Support the repeal. We need jobs!” Watch it:

As The Huffington Post’s Luke Johnson reported, other Third Way co-chairs have commented on the growing controversy over the Wall Street Journal column. Representatives Joseph Crowley (D-NY), Allyson Schwartz (D-PA) and Ron Kind (D-WI)—all Third Way co-chairs—have distanced themselves from the arguments laid out in the piece.

We noted earlier this week that several Third Way trustees gave campaign money to Mitt Romney. But it might be even more problematic for the group that it has ties to the US Chamber, an organization that is dedicated to unseating Third Way leaders.

Peter Rothberg lists the top ten songs about Nelson Mandela.

Fox Business, an affiliate of Fox News, has responded to the rise of worker protests across the country by inviting on a finance industry trader to trash them.

The network aired several segments this week designed to criticize efforts to raise the minimum wage. In one, guest Jonathan Hoenig made a range of strange and misinformed comments, including a declaration that “every prominent economist over many, many decades has agreed [that] the minimum wage is discrimination.”

In reality, more than 100 economists have called for raising the minimum wage to benefit workers. Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz signed onto a letter last year arguing that “a minimum wage increase would provide a much-needed boost to the earnings of low-wage workers.”

Hoenig then argued, “Only about 4 percent of people making the minimum wage are actually supporting a family full-time.” The Economic Policy Institute notes that over a quarter of those who would be affected by increasing the minimum wage are parents, and a third are married. Also, one in every five children in the United States has a parent who would benefit from a federal minimum wage increase.

Finally, Hoenig said his opposition to increasing the minimum wage stems from his belief that doing so would prevent workers from becoming the CEO of McDonald’s and other fast-food chains. One has to wonder if Hoenig, a financial investment advisor based in Chicago, has ever bothered to meet with the McDonald’s workers in his city who are gainfully employed, yet, homeless.

Gabriel Thompson goes on NPR to discuss how Walmart is exploiting its warehouse workers.

Third Way, a centrist think tank that portrays itself as a Democratic group, has some advice for the party: avoid economic populism at all costs. In a column for The Wall Street Journal today, the group argues that the party should steer clear of creating a strong safety net, and criticizes Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio’s call for universal pre-K funded through an upper-income tax increase as a foolhardy idea for national Democrats.

As many have noted today, in reaction to the column, Third Way’s attacks on Social Security and Medicare fail on the merits. It’s bad policy, and it’s equally bad politics.

But for Third Way, a group founded in 2005 that is highly active on Capitol Hill, the think tank is merely defending the special interest groups that allow it to exist.

Buried inside the annual report for Third Way is a revelation that the group relies on a peculiar DC consulting firm to raise half a million a year: Peck, Madigan, Jones & Stewart. Peck Madigan is no ordinary nonprofit buckraiser. The group is, in fact, a corporate lobbying firm that represents Deutsche Bank, Intel, the Business Roundtable, Amgen, AT&T, the International Swaps & Derivatives Association, MasterCard, New York Life Insurance, PhRMA and the US Chamber of Commerce, among others.

The two organizations complement each other well. Peck Madigan signs as a lobbyist for the government of New Zealand on the Trans-Pacific Partnership free trade deal; Third Way aggressively promotes the deal. Peck Madigan clients push for entitlement cuts, and so does Third Way.

Notice that Humana, a major health insurance company, lists its $50,000 donation to Third Way not as a donation to a think tank but as part of its yearly budget spent on lobbying activity, up there with the Florida Chamber and other trade associations. The company views financial gifts to Third Way as part of its strategy for increasing its profit-making political influence.

What’s more, Third Way’s leadership has tenuous connections to the Democratic Party it hopes to shape. Daniel Loeb, a hedge fund manager listed as a trustee on Third Way’s 2012 annual disclosure, bundled $556,031 for Mitt Romney last year. Third Way board member Derek Kaufman, another hedge fund executive, also gave to Romney.

There is a long and storied tradition of corporate, right-wing interests seeking to shape the economic policies of the Democratic Party. The DLC, another Third Way–style group that folded in 2011, was funded by none other than Koch Industries. Richard Fink, a strategist to the Koch brothers who helped found what is now known as Americans for Prosperity, was on the DLC’s board.

Washington’s Big Business–friendly press has greeted the Third Way column as a “game changer.” But these arguments aren’t new, and neither are the strategies. Large corporations have many ways of finding useful surrogates, and Third Way is a prime example.

UPDATE: Daily Kos’s Hunter has a nice post noting how Third Way’s hatred of Senator Elizabeth Warren may relate to the fact that Third Way’s board is made up almost entirely of investment bankers and other Wall Street executives. Also worth considering, the anti-privatization drive of those “economic populism” types might rub some Third Way board leaders the wrong way—especially the one who sits on Correction Corporation of America’s board.

More Lee Fang: how the Turkey Lobby blocked child-labor regulations.