LOBBYISTS2

started 3/14

SEE LOBBYING 3

see revolve door

capt txt 619 921 bak

htm; favorable treatment

tool;

https://www.propublica.org/nerds/propublica-congress-api-lobbying-registrations-and-more

==

1119 tool

:{From the White House to the halls of Congress to less glamorous federal government agencies, lobbyists are tasked with delivering their clients’ messages throughout Washington, D.C.

OpenSecrets’ recently-revamped }:lobbying database includes the ability to see which lobbyists are attempting to influence each government agency.

_{**Read more**}_

top sectors 1998-2021

top 20 2020

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also BGR

Former Sen. Mark Kirk and old flame retroactively register as lobbyists

Posted by Keturah Hetrick on Sept. 28, 2020

Ex-Sen. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) and his one-time girlfriend quietly registered as first-time lobbyists for work they began a year ago.

Kirk and Dodie McCracken started work last October on behalf of MP Materials. The rare-earth-materials mining company hired the pair to lobby on "rare earth materials supply chain and critical supply chain issues," according to a disclosure filed last week. The filing does not indicate whether or not the contract is still active.

McCracken made headlines in 2012, when the senator's ex-wife accused Kirk of hiding $143,000 in campaign payments to McCracken, then his girlfriend. The FEC later decided that the payments did not run afoul of the law, according to the Chicago Tribune. In addition to her apparent campaign work, McCracken served as district director and press secretary to then-Rep. Kirk from 2001-2003.

She and the senator are working through Kirk Global Advisors, which Kirk established after losing his 2016 reelection bid. McCracken's role with the firm, as well as her current relationship to Kirk, are unclear.

an 1021

During the 2020 Democratic primary, Sen. Elizabeth Warren made fighting corruption her number one priority. It may not have seemed that way in the press, which tended to characterize the senior senator from Massachusetts as a female Sen. Bernie Sanders. Most coverage focused heavily on her bold economic ideas, such as a wealth tax. But when she was actually asked what her major focus in politics was, Warren never hesitated to say that fighting corruption should come first — because of her commitment to passing progressive economic policies.

"The rich and the powerful have been calling the shots in Washington forever and ever," Warren told Vox's Ezra Klein in 2019, explaining why she was intent on passing a massive anti-corruption bill meant to curtail the influence of lobbyists and influence of moneyed interests on Capitol Hill.

"Look closely, and you'll see — on issue after issue, widely popular policies are stymied because giant corporations and billionaireswho don't want to pay taxes or follow any rules use their money and influence to stand in the way of big, structural change," she wrote in her plan announcement.

Warren's view is, sadly and perhaps surprisingly, not popular. Republicans clearly don't view corruption as a bad thing these days — that's one more reason why they love Donald Trump. But even on the left, where everyone says they're against corruption and voters in particular always sign off on the idea that ending corruption is a good idea, there's a gulf between saying you're against it and actually working to eradicate it. If more agreed with Warren to make corruption a priority target, we might not be watching President Joe Biden's bold agenda slowly fall apart now.

When it comes to brass tacks, not enough people are willing to put in the effort required to make fighting corruption a real agenda item. Activists are more likely to put their time into causes like health care and climate change. Democratic politicians, when they get power, are also attracted to policy fights that offer tangible rewards, such as increased social spending, rather than the more abstract and far-flung discourse about lobbyists and corruption. And voters definitely reward politicians for these priorities, which is one reason why Warren lost handily in the primary to Sanders and Biden.

But as the current debacle playing out on Capitol Hill demonstrates, Warren was right all along. Democrats and their voters may want to pass progressive legislation that addresses wealth inequality, climate change and lack of health care. But corrupt business interests keep stopping them. It's like trying to make a dress when someone keeps stealing your sewing machine. You can have the pattern and the fabric and the vision, but if you don't have the means to put it all together, you will never get that dress made.

Biden and Sanders are learning this the hard way as their dual vision for the Build Back Better plan — an expansive set of bills meant to address climate change, reduce poverty, ensure child care, expand health care, and build up American infrastructure, among other things — teeters on the edge of collapse. After spending months carefully constructing a two-track plan where moderate Democrats would support the progressive agenda, in exchange for progressives supporting the moderate agenda, a handful of centrist Democrats in the House and Senate are about to blow the whole thing up by reneging on their end of the bargain. And while there are multiple reasons for this backstabbing behavior, it's hard not to notice that the undue influence of lobbyists.

The two biggest names in the Senate Betrayal Caucus are, of course, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. Both are throwing their weight around, clearly trying to derail Biden's agenda while claiming to have no such intention. Instead, they come with an endless array of incoherent, even nonsensical, explanations as to why they can't just suck it up and vote for the two-bill track the Democratic caucus agreed to vote on. There's now an entire cottage industry built around psychoanalyzing these two: What do they want? What will get them to "yes"? Why won't they just tell us what they want, so we can give it to them? Why are they making so little sense?

Everyone has a favorite reason, but the likeliest is the boring one: They're being dodgy because they don't want to be honest about their real motives. Looking at their track records, it's hard not to notice that both deeply enjoy being wined and dined by some of the sleaziest lobbyists and fundraisers on Capitol Hill. Manchin, for instance, blew off fellow Democrats begging him to support voting rights in favor of going to a fundraiser held by oil and gas executives who have a financial interest in keeping working people from voting. Sinema is deep in cahoots with industry lobbyists who want to tank Biden's agenda, holding fundraisers with anti-Biden groups and taking money from the pharmacy industry, right before doing an about-face to block fair pricing drug policies she previously claimed to support.

It's not just those two. The price control policy for pharmaceuticals is one of the most wildly popular items in the Biden agenda — at least with voters. But a small group of Democrats in the House pulled that item out of the bill, and they're barely trying to pretend it's for any reason other than to appease pharmaceutical lobbyists. They likely know that politicians and voters may say they oppose corruption, but that actually doing something to stop it never becomes a priority.

Lobbyists have Sinema's ear, but her own party and voters do not. The Democratic party in Arizona is threatening a vote of no confidence against her, and her response was somewhere between a shrug and throwing them the finger. Activists are crowdfunding for a primary challenger against her. It is possible she is such an egomaniac that she thinks she's going to have a great re-election after teeing off her own voters, of course.But it's also hard not to wonder if she isn't influenced by the knowledge that she's all but guaranteed a well-heeled job in lobbying if she loses re-election. Notably, a lifetime ban on politicians becoming lobbyists is part of Warren's anti-corruption bill. If it was law, then Sinema might be making more pro-voter choices, rather than treating her constituents as an annoying inconvenience.

Corruption isn't a sexy issue, but focusing attention on it can pay huge dividends when it comes to advancing progressive causes. Take gun control, for instance. Decades of rational argumentation and emotional appeals did little to move the needle, policy-wise. Even in the face of children being murdered in schools repeatedly, Republican politicians have successfully blocked all bills, and Democrats didn't even bother making it a priority when they got power.Eventually, however, gun control advocates started to look away from the ideological arguments and toward the influence of the gun industry, through its main lobbying arm, the NRA.

Once they did that, real progress started to happen. Investigations revealed that the NRA was a thoroughly corrupt organization and that its leadership was on the take. Then the lawsuits started to fly. Now the organization is in very real danger of collapse — not because of its views, but because of its corruption. It might be too late, and Republicans may be too dug in on their gun mania to ever start to moderate. But without the NRA in their ear all the time, there could be a real chance to persuade even just a few Republicans to support common sense reforms that are backed by the majority of Americans. But only if the NRA is gone — and coming at them from a corruption angle was the path to this possibility.

It's admittedly a tough sell, even to Democrats. Most Democrats have been happy to back bills that tackle the issue in similar ways to what Warren proposes, and many seem to understand that they would benefit from a more level playing field, where wealthy interests have less influence over policy and politics. Still, as with most legislation that Democrats want to pass, anti-corruption bills have been torn apart on the shores of the filibuster. And the two people who are doing the most to make sure the filibuster remains and anti-corruption bills have no chance of passing? You guessed it: Manchin and Sinema. Corruption on Capitol Hill is a grotesque a house of mirrors, and until that changes, real progress will be an impossibly tall hill to climb.

roofpac s-corp, grocer ...lobbyists

arizona Democratic Senator Kyrsten Sinema is scheduled to hold a fundraiser today with five business lobbying groups that oppose a massive spending bill containing some of the Biden administration’s top legislative priorities. That’s according to The New York Times, which reports attendees are being asked to write checks for up to $5,800 to Senator Sinema’s campaign. Sinema says she opposes the spending bill’s price tag of $3.5 trillion over 10 years. The legislation would increase taxes on wealthy individuals and corporations in order to expand the social safety net, improve worker rights and combat the climate crisis. Sinema’s support is critical to Democrats’ plans to use a budget reconciliation bill to pass the legislation in the evenly divided Senate.

==

exxon guy busted

https://www.channel4.com/news/revealed-exxonmobils-lobbying-war-on-climate-change-legislation

explosive footage was obtained byUnearthed, Greenpeace UK’s investigative platform,who posed as head-hunters to obtain the information from one of ExxonMobil’s most senior Washington lobbyists.

The recordings appear to reveal the secretive behind-the-scenes activities of a lobbyist for a company that claims in public to support action on climate change, while fighting against legislative attempts to tackle it.

ExxonMobil say they “have supported climate science for decades” and accuse Greenpeace of “waging a multi-decade campaign” against their company and industry.

They insist their “lobbying fully comply with all laws and are publicly disclosed on a quarterly basis.”

‘Shadow groups’

Keith McCoy is a senior ExxonMobil lobbyist on Capitol Hilland has represented the company in its liaison with the US Congress for the last eight years.

Greenpeace UK’s Unearthed platform posed as head-hunters looking to hire a Washington D.C. lobbyist for a major client. They approached Mr McCoy, who agreed to speak over Zoom.

During the covert recordings, which have been passed to Channel 4 News, Mr McCoy claims:

• thecompany secretly fought against legislative action on climate change using third-party organisations
• he lobbied key senators to remove and/or diminish climate change measures from President Biden’s US $2 trillion infrastructure and jobs bill as it proceeds through the legislative process
• he regards trade bodies like theAmerican Petroleum Institute as “whipping boys” in order to avoid public scrutiny on Capitol Hill
• BUFFER

During the virtual meeting held on 7 May, the investigators asked Mr McCoy questions about ExxonMobil’s current and historical lobbying on environmental issues.

In the excerpts from the footage to be broadcast on Channel 4 News tonight, Mr McCoy claims that ExxonMobil has aggressively fought science to deny climate change in order to maximise profit and shareholder return. He alleges that ExxonMobil joined “shadow groups” to pursue climate change denial.

Mr McCoy said: “Did we aggressively fight against some of the science?  Yes. Did we hide our science?  Absolutely not.  Did we join some of these shadow groups to work against some of the early efforts? Yes, that’s true. But there’s nothing, there’s nothing illegal about that.

“We were looking out for our investments. We were looking out for our shareholders.”

ExxonMobil told Channel 4 News that they “have supported climate science for decades.”

‘It’s like fishing’

Mr McCoy likens the approach to lobbying congressmen to the way fishermen target fish, claiming that ExxonMobil puts out “bait” and then “reels in” congressmen on issues like carbon tax, electric vehicles, chemicals, taxation and infrastructure.

Mr McCoy said: “When you have an opportunity to talk to a member of Congress, I liken it to fishing, right? You know you have bait, you throw that bait out. And they say: ‘Oh, you want to talk about infrastructure, yeah.’

“And then you start to reel them in and you start to have these conversations about federal leasing programmes, you start to have these conversations about a carbon tax. You know, it’s all these opportunities that you use and to use the fishing analogy again just to kind of reel them in.”

He added: “I make sure I get them the right information that they need so they look good. And then they help me out. They’re a captive audience. They know they need you. And I need them.”

He says lobbyists aim to have a direct relationship with a member of congress, adding: “You want to be able to go to the chief… and say we need congressman so and so to be able to either introduce this bill, we need him to make a floor statement, we need him to send a letter. You name it, we’ve asked for everything.”

‘The Kingmaker’

Mr McCoy names 11 senators who he says are “crucial” to ExxonMobil: Senator Shelley Moore Capito, Senator Joe Manchin, Senator KyrstenSinema,Senator Jon Tester, Senator Maggie Hassan, Senator John Barrasso, Senator John Cornyn, Senator Steve Daines, dem Senator Chris Coons, Senator Mark Kelly and Senator Marco Rubio

We gave all these senators a chance to respond. All the senators declined to comment. There is no suggestion of illegality.

Channel 4 News has established, through Federal Election Commission (FEC) data, that all except two of these senators (Senators Maggie Hassan and Mark Kelly) have received financial contributions from ExxonMobil.

ExxonMobil insists “our lobbying efforts fully comply with all laws and are publicly disclosed on a quarterly basis”.

Mr McCoy described Senator Joe Manchin as “the Kingmaker” in the Senate and he says he spoke to his office on a weekly basis.

The FEC data shows Senator Manchin has received at least $12,500 from the ExxonMobil Political Action Committee in declared disbursements since the beginning of the 2011-12 election cycle.

Mr McCoy described how a “big piece of [his] job is education and advocacy” and says that in his work on behalf of ExxonMobil he argues that US government programmes to roll outelectric vehicles are unrealistic. [INVENTED PRIUS AND BATT THEN BAILLED]

He said: “The research and development conversation has taken us a long way because of climate change. And there is a struggle to find solutions and to get the reductions that they’re looking for. And you’re not going to be able to just switch to battery operated vehicles or wind for your electricity. And just having that conversation around why that’s not possible in the next 10 years is critically important to the work that we do.”

‘Whipping boy’

Mr McCoy described a lobbying strategy in which he claims ExxonMobil uses third parties to mask its interests from public view and accountability.

He said: “We don’t want it to be us, to have these conversations, especially in a hearing. It’s getting our associations to step in and have those conversations and answer those tough questions and be for, the lack of a better term, the whipping boy for some of these members of congress.”

He added: “There was something we were working on earlier this week where we, where our CEO was invited to a hearing from a member of congress who we know is just going to rip him to shreds when he goes there. So, we look at it and we say: well, why us?”

Mr McCoy claims that ExxonMobil lobbied Congress to dilute the climate provisions of President Biden’s Infrastructure Bill.

He said: “That’s a completely different conversation when you start to stick to roads and bridges.And instead of a $2 trillion bill, it’s an $800 billion dollar bill. If you lower that threshold, you stick to highways and bridges then a lot of the negative stuff starts to come out.”

“Why would you put in something on emissions reductions on climate change to oil refineries in a highway bill? So, people say yeah that doesn’t make any sense, so then you get to the germane of saying that shouldn’t be in this bill.”

ExxonMobil said: “Our discussion on the bill are not accurately portrayed. Our lobbying efforts are related to a tax burden that could disadvantage us businesses.”

Carbon tax

Mr McCoy appears to suggest that ExxonMobil’s public support for a carbon tax is underpinned by the conviction it will never happen, allowing the company to “support” it in order to appear green.

He said: “I will tell you there is not an appetite for a carbon tax. It is a non-starter. Nobody is going to propose a tax on all Americans. And the cynical side of me says yeah we kind of know that. But it gives us a talking point. We can say well what is ExxonMobil for? Well we’re for a carbon tax.

“Carbon tax is not gonna happen. I have always said, and I’ve worked on climate change issues for twenty years. There’s a lot of talk around it and the bottom line is it’s going to take political courage, political will in order to get something done. And that just doesn’t exist in politics. It just doesn’t.

Purporting to speak on behalf of ExxonMobil, Mr McCoy also expressed a corporate view that, contrary to science,natural gas is a clean energy source.

He said: “On a clean electricity standard, we think natural gas will play a key role in anything. And not just as a bridge fuel. We think it is a low emission energy source and should be part of a clean electricity standard.”

ExxonMobil statement

A spokesperson for ExxonMobil told Channel 4 News:  “Greenpeace has waged a multi-decade campaign against our company and industry, which has included false claims and unlawful actions at our facilities as well as those of other companies around the world.

“Our lobbying efforts are related to a tax burden that could disadvantage U.S. businesses, and we have made that position known publicly. ExxonMobil stands by our position thatincreased taxes on American businesses make the U.S. less competitive.

“We have been clear in supporting an efficient, economy-wide price on carbon as the best way to achieve the goals of the Paris Agreement.While there is not broad support for a tax, we are actively and publicly discussing other options, including lower-carbon fuels and other sector-based approaches that would place a uniform, predictable cost on carbon.

“We have supported climate science for decades.Greenpeace and others have distorted our position on climate science and our support for effective policy solutions.

”ExxonMobil transparently engages with a variety of trade associations, think tanks and coalitions in order to promote informed dialogue and sound public policy in areas pertinent to the Corporation’s interests.

“ExxonMobil exercises its right to engage in lobbying in the United States at both the Federal and State levels to advocate our positions on issues that affect our Corporation and the energy industry.

“We have a responsibility to our customers, employees, communities and shareholders to represent their interests in public policy discussions that impact our business.

“Our lobbying efforts fully comply with all laws and are publicly disclosed on a quarterly basis, including the issues we discuss.”

https://www.alternet.org/2021/09/companies-lobbying-against-infrastructure-tax-hikes-have-dodged-millions-in-taxes-report/

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President Joe Biden's American Jobs Plan proposal would raise the United States' corporate tax rate to 28% in order to pay for infrastructure projects. Some large corporations, journalist Akela Lacy stresses in an article published by The Intercept on September 6, have been aggressively lobbying against that proposal — and they include everything from pharmaceutical companies to financial firms, some of which dodged a fortune in taxes.

"Companies that…. lobbied earlier this year on issues related to tax rates in Biden's American Jobs Plan include Walmart, Oracle, Accenture, Bristol Myers Squibb, Shell and Walgreens, according to an analysis by Accountable.US, a nonpartisan watchdog group focused on public corruption," Lacy explains. "Executives at companies that have historically avoided paying taxes, like Johnson & Johnson, JPMorgan Chase, FedEx, and DuPont, have spoken out publicly against Biden's proposed tax increases."

Lacy continues, "Shell and Walgreens lobbied earlier this year on corporate tax issues in the American Jobs Plan. Walmart hired a lobbying firm tasked with 'monitoring of tax proposals related to infrastructure' in the plan and proposed legislative efforts related to Donald Trump's 2017 tax cuts. Accenture hired another firm to 'monitor the American Jobs Plan as it relates to corporate taxes.' Oracle and Bristol Myers Squibb, a multinational pharmaceutical company, used the same firm hired by Accenture to monitor and lobby on similar issues in the proposal."

Lacy goes on to note how successful some of these mega-corporations have been when it comes to dodging taxes — and not only in the United States.

"A Reuters report last year found that from 2018 to 2019, Shell reported $2.7 billion through offshore tax havens and avoided paying hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes," Lacy writes. "In 2019, Australia charged Shell $755 million for six years' worth of taxes the company did not pay. The company reported that after getting tax refunds related to the closure of oil platforms, it paid no corporate income tax in the U.K. in 2018 on $731 million in profits."

Lacy points to Walgreens as another company that knows how to dodge taxes.

"Between 2008 and 2014," Lacy explains, "Walmart held more than $23.3 billion in offshore accounts and avoided paying more than $4.59 billion in U.S. taxes, according to a 2016 Oxfam report. In an arrangement internally known as Project Flex, the company routed money through an allegedly fictitious Chinese subsidiary, Quartz reported, which allowed it to avoid paying $2.6 billion in U.S. taxes between 2014 and 2017. The 2016 report from the U.S. PIRG, CTJ, and ITEP also found that Walmart reported zero tax haven subsidiaries despite having as many as 75."

CoC? lobbyist busted in scam for job said exxon, manchin in his pocket?

921

infra twin bill

https://www.alternet.org/2021/09/lobbying-congress/

New report details a 'massive lobbying blitz' against Biden's agenda — but Sanders has a warning for them

an 921

...no lnx

...the Post, which published Sanders' remarks on Tuesday, offered a detailed look at the "massive lobbying blitz" that corporate America has launched in recent days in a bid to water down—or kill entirely—the reconciliation package, a centerpiece of President Joe Biden's economic and climate agenda.

The range of big-name corporations involved in the campaign—from the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer to the fossil fuel behemoth ExxonMobil—reflects the potentially far-reaching scope of the nascent reconciliation bill, which could allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices, reverse former President Donald Trump's corporate tax cut, institute paid family and medical leave, strengthen workers' rights, and establish a pathway to citizenship for millions of undocumented immigrants.

"The emerging opposition appears to be vast, spanning drug manufacturers, big banks, tech titans, major retailers, and oil-and-gas giants,"the Post's Tony Romm reported. "In recent weeks, top Washington organizations representing these and other industries have started strategizing behind the scenes, seeking to battle back key elements in Democrats proposed overhaul to federal healthcare, education, and safety net programs."

One of the organizations that has been "most active" in the effort to prevent passage of the reconciliation bill, according to the Post, is the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the largest business lobbying organization in the country. Romm reported that the Chamber is "in the early stages of putting together an economywide coalition to coordinate the fight against the still-forming economic package, including its significant price tag, policy scope, and potential for tax increases."

"The Chamber-organized effort could encompass traditional lobbying on Capitol Hill as well as advertising campaigns targeting Democratic lawmakers," Romm noted. "The group has been in talks with potential allies such as the National Association of Manufacturers, whose board includes executives from firms such as Dow Inc., Exxon, Caterpillar, and Johnson & Johnson... Other opponents include the Business Roundtable, whose board counts the chief executives from Apple and Walmart."

As Democrats move further along in the process of translating their newly approved $3.5 trillion budget blueprint into legislative text—a process lawmakers hope to complete by next month—the lobbying push is likely to intensify. The Hill reported Monday that corporate influence-peddlers are growing "increasingly optimistic" that they will succeed in keeping major tax hikes, Medicare expansion, and other critical measures out of the final package...

"The business community has made progress with certain Democrats on legitimate policy concerns with some of these proposals and their implications on the economy and international competitiveness," an unnamed lobbyist with ties to Senate Democrats told The Hill. "A lot of those arguments are landing."

While The Hill does not name the "certain Democrats" who have been receptive to lobbyists' arguments, the outlet noted that "business interests have Democratic allies in Sens. Joe Manchin (W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.) and the group of House moderates led by Rep. Josh Gottheimer (N.J.)"—all of whom have voiced opposition to the $3.5 trillion price tag.

But Sanders—who has characterized the reconciliation bill as potentially the most consequential legislation since the New Deal—said in an interview last week that $3.5 trillion is "the minimum of what we should be spending."...

super-lobbyist jack a busted fraud felony? bitcoin Green new Deal

https://www.alternet.org/2021/08/corporate-lobbying/

no lnx twt

'Democracy for sale': Analysis ties corporate consolidation to increased lobbying

Jessica Corbett and Common Dreams August 26, 2021

An analysis published Wednesday about corporate consolidation and political lobbying in the United States found that large mergers—particularly in Big Tech, the pharmaceutical industry, and the oil and gas sector—has increased corporate control of American democracy.

The new research paper from the American Economic Liberties—entitled Project Democracy for Sale: Examining the Effects of Concentration on Lobbying in the United States (pdf)—was authored by Reed Showalter, an attorney and a fellow at the anti-monopoly group.

"Concentrated markets are bad for consumers, bad for workers, and bad for innovation. But this research suggests that the concentration crisis in America is even more than a purely economic problem—it's also a democracy problem," Showalter said in a statement.

"We urgently need to understand and contain the power that monopolies have over the rest of us," he asserted. "Lawmakers, enforcers, and leaders cannot afford to ignore the widespread harms from concentration any longer."

The report emphasizes that "the bigger companies get, the more powerful they become. A large majority of Americans distrust concentrated economic power, and criticism of the world's largest companies is a regular part of discourse within America's political parties and around the world. Research has borne out the power of money in politics."

"Corporate lobbying works," the paper continues. "A number of studies show that the amount spent on lobbying positively impacts a firm's equity returns and market share. Firms that engage in lobbying also appear to have lower effective tax rates than those that do not."

Given those conditions, Showalter examined the U.S. internet, pharmaceutical, and fossil fuel sectors. The paper notes that the first case study "primarily includes digital platform companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Netflix" and "does not extend, for example, to internet providers and other internet infrastructure companies."

The researcher found "a noteworthy relationship" between consolidation and political activity. Though the data is a bit limited—which the paper acknowledges, urging some degree of caution—it shows that "in all three industries, concentration appears to predict elevated lobbying spending."

According to Showalter:

In the oil and gas industry as well as among internet companies, the more market power a corporation acquires, the more it lobbies. In the pharmaceutical industry, the data is even more compelling. When pharmaceutical companies gained market power, they lobbied more, and when they lost market power, they lobbied less. One tentative conclusion from this analysis is that monopolies seek to acquire political power, whereas competitive businesses focus on competing with each other instead of dominating public rule-making bodies.

"In short, the results of this report suggest that not only is big business good at lobbying, but that bigger business leads to more lobbying," the paper says. "That means monopoly is a threat to representative democracy—and that protecting our democracy requires effective antitrust."

The report also addresses the political implications of Showalter's findings—specifically, the suggestion that the negative impacts of industry concentration "cannot be understood merely through the consumer welfare lens" and using that standard to govern antitrust "allows practitioners in the field to ignore non-price effects" of companies consolidating.

The new research "casts doubt on pure regulatory solutions that do not reduce concentration, since more lobbying can mitigate regulatory action or even turn regulatory choices into mechanisms to protect entrenched incumbents," the paper says. "If concentration begets political influence, then even a hypothetically economically efficient monopoly offering low consumer prices can still be an undemocratic usurper of political power."

In other words, according to the report, "stronger antitrust premised on reducing corporate concentration should be understood not just as a mechanism to address market power problems, but as an anti-corruption measure in itself."

Concluding that "corporate concentration and antidemocratic political influence go hand in hand," Showalter urges U.S. policymakers to recognize the limits of the consumer welfare standard when creating and implementing new regulations for major industries.

"The antitrust laws were a response to rising economic concentration, and the laws' framers recognized that concentrated economic power can poison our democracy," he writes. "This article is a starting point but hopefully also a reminder that antitrust is equipped and designed to grapple with the political ramifications of economic concentration. Those crafting and enforcing the doctrine should feel empowered to step into the shoes they were meant to fill."

The New York Times' "DealBook" newsletter noted Showalter's ties to President Joe Biden:

Showalter's report begins with an interesting acknowledgment, thanking Tim Wu, a former Columbia law professor who is now a technology and competition policy adviser at the White House. What's more, Showalter works at the law firm founded by Jonathan Kanter, whom President Biden recently nominated to lead the Justice Department's antitrust division. Showalter said that Kanter did not discuss the report with him and that his work as a fellow was separate from his day job. But he acknowledged more generally that the expansive approach to antitrust that his report advocated appeared to be ascendant in the halls of power.

The report comes as Congress is considering a package of antitrust bills advanced by the House Judiciary Committee in late June.Demand Progress executive director David Segal pointed out at the time that "many members are reciting Big Tech's talking points and pushing their amendments. This is why it is necessary that Congress act to break these companies up and diminish their power of speech, the economy, and our government."

"No matter what does or doesn't emerge from Congress in the coming weeks or months, it is vital that the Biden administration use existing tools to rein in the power of these monopolies," he added, calling Lina Khan, the president's pick to chair the Federal Trade Commission, "a tremendous step in this direction" and urging more similar actions that prioritize the public interest.

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msnbc? calls it romney exxon bill, not the bipart infra

https://www.alternet.org/2021/07/senior-exxonmobil-lobbyist/

raw story

Channel 4 in the U.K. published a startling expose on ExxonMobil's lobbyists who revealed the top most important U.S. Senators who are the ones behind any legislation that might hurt the oil industry.

While many oil companies are diversifying with natural gas, it appears ExxonMobil is going all-in battling to keep "big oil" alive and well.

"Keith McCoy is a senior ExxonMobil lobbyist on Capitol Hill and has represented the company in its liaison with the U.S. Congress for the last eight years," explained the report.

"Did we aggressively fight against some of the science? Yes. Did we hide our science? Absolutely not," said McCoy on camera. "Did we join some of these shadow groups to work against some of the early efforts? Yes, that's true. But there's nothing, there's nothing illegal about that. We were looking out for our investments. We were looking out for our shareholders."

McCoy compared his work with elected officials to fishing with ExxonMobil who supplies the "bait" before it "reels in" the official on issues like a carbon tax, electric cars, taxation and infrastructure.

"When you have an opportunity to talk to a member of Congress, I liken it to fishing, right? You know you have bait, you throw that bait out. And they say: 'Oh, you want to talk about infrastructure, yeah,'" McCoy continued. "And then you start to reel them in and you start to have these conversations about federal leasing programs, you start to have these conversations about a carbon tax.You know, it's all these opportunities that you use and to use the fishing analogy again just to kind of reel them in."

"I make sure I get them the right information that they need so they look good. And then they help me out. They're a captive audience. They know they need you. And I need them," McCoy also said.

He went on to explain that lobbyists aim to have close relationships with officials.

"You want to be able to go to the chief… and say we need congressman so and so to be able to either introduce this bill, we need him to make a floor statement, we need him to send a letter. You name it, we've asked for everything," he said.

But it was the shocking revelation that he has 11 U.S. Senators on the hook.

"Senator Shelley Moore Capito, Senator Joe Manchin, Senator Kyrsten Sinema, Senator Jon Tester, Senator Maggie Hassan, Senator John Barrasso, Senator John Cornyn, Senator Steve Daines, Senator Chris Coons, Senator Mark Kelly and Senator Marco Rubio," were all cited.

He went on to explain that the last thing they want is to appear in a public hearing before Congress where the American people can see.

"We don't want it to be us, to have these conversations, especially in a hearing. It's getting our associations to step in and have those conversations and answer those tough questions and be for, the lack of a better term, the whipping boy for some of these members of congress," McCoy confessed.

"There was something we were working on earlier this week where we, where our CEO was invited to a hearing from a member of congress who we know is just going to rip him to shreds when he goes there. So, we look at it and we say: well, why us?" he asked.

See the video below and read the full story at Channel 4:

https://www.alternet.org/2021/05/vaccine/

comm dr

While global health advocates applauded the Biden administration's recent decision to support waiving intellectual property protections for Covid-19 vaccines as "critical," "transformative," and "unquestionably the right thing to do," Big Pharma took a decidedly less optimistic view of the move and has been hard at work behind the scenes in a bid to thwart the policy, a report published Friday by The Intercept revealed.

In a bid to stymie U.S. support for a proposal by India and South Africa to enact a Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) waiver at the World Trade Organization (WTO), the pharmaceutical industry is "distributing talking points, organizing opposition, and even collecting congressional signatures in an attempt to reverse President Joe Biden's support for worldwide access to generic Covid-19 vaccines," according to The Intercept's Lee Fang.

Fang obtained an email from Jared Michaud, a lobbyist with the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA)—a trade group whose clients include vaccine developers AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson, and Pfizer—describing how Big Pharma and sympathetic U.S. legislators are pushing lawmakers to oppose a TRIPS waiver.

The email explains that Reps. Buddy Carter (R-Ga.) and Vern Buchanan (R-Fla.) are leading an unreleased letter to Biden—which currently has 29 co-signers—"expressing concerns with the administration's support for waiving IP protections related to Covid-19 vaccines under the WTO TRIPS waiver."

"We urge you to contact offices and ask them to sign onto this letter," said Michaud's email.

The letter additionally claims that the TRIPS waiver would cost U.S. jobs and be a boon for China, which would "profit from our innovation."

Michaud's email contains talking points that paint the IP waiver as a national security threat that would "irreversibly damage American innovators" and the U.S. government's "strategic engagement," while a separate document marked "confidential" claims that "waiving intellectual property will undermine the global response to the pandemic and compromise vaccine safety."

According to Fang, "The metadata for the document shows that the PDF document was created by Megan Van Etten, an international public affairs specialist for PhRMA."

Fang notes that PhRMA spent $24 million on lobbying at the federal level last year "and is one of the biggest corporate players in election spending."

According to OpenSecrets, PhRMA has spent $8.7 million on lobbying so far this year. This, as client Pfizer has raked in $3.5 billion in profits from the sale of its Covid-19 vaccine in just the first three months of 2021.

"The group has long shaped drug policy not only domestically but also in the international arena," writes Fang. "PhRMA led the pushin the late 1990s to pressure South African President Nelson Mandela to drop efforts to break patent laws and allow for the importation and manufacture of generic HIV/AIDS medications, which at the time cost an annual $10,000-$15,000 per patient."

Progressive U.S. lawmakers have taken Big Pharma and its lobbyists to task for their opposition to Covid-19 vaccine patent waivers.

"Amid a global pandemic, major pharmaceutical companies are lobbying to protect billions in profits," Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said in March following the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's dismissal of the proposed TRIPS waiver as "misguided."

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

• Here's the truth about the COVID vaccine side effects - Alternet.org ›
• Republicans are trying to sabotage Biden's COVID vaccine plan ... ›
• Exposed: Big pharma's plot to twart US Covid-19 vaccine waiver ... ›

omfg

1/21/21

,,,In other words, Bannon ripped off thousands of fans of the president he helped elect to personally enrich himself, according to the indictment. And it's worse than that, because Trump was supposed to be building the wall as president with the federal government, not with private funds. And it's even worse than that, because Trump campaigned for months on the idea that Mexico would pay for the wall — a promise widely derided and mocked, but that Trump insisted was legitimate.

But Trump cares so little for the fans who support him, he's happy to let the man who allegedly defrauded them off the hook. The White House statement on the matter gave no explanation or justification for this pardon:

President Trump granted a full pardon to Stephen Bannon. Prosecutors pursued Mr. Bannon with charges related to fraud stemming from his involvement in a political project. Mr. Bannon has been an important leader in the conservative movement and is known for his political acumen.

In another betrayal, Trump found a new way to break another of his 2016 campaign promises: "Drain the swamp" — that is, ridding Washington, D.C., of corruption.

As a part of this supposed commitment, Trump made a big show near the start of his term of enacting a five-year lobbying ban for officials who leave the administration. In truth, Trump's ethics rules weakened what had come before, but this measure was supposed to limit outside influence and inappropriate access.

"This was something, a five-year ban, that I was talking about a lot on the campaign trail, and we are now putting it into effect," Trump said when signing the order in 2017.

In January 2017, flanked by his top aides, President Trump made a big show out of signing an executive order that w… https://t.co/jwWn8NL17D

— Yashar Ali (@Yashar Ali )1611124783.0

On Wednesday morning, the White House issued an order revoking these restrictions, making them meaningless for anyone who had stayed through the entire administration, and cutting them short for anyone who had left early:

Executive Order 13770 of January 28, 2017, "Ethics Commitments by Executive Branch Appointees," is hereby revoked, effective at noon January 20, 2021. Employees and former employees subject to the commitments in Executive Order 13770 will not be subject to those commitments after noon January 20, 2021.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/how-the-so-called-champion-of-american-business-fought-to-protect-profiteering-and-endangered-millions

As hospital intensive care units overflow again, and delays in COVID-19 testing reports reach record levels in many cities, a conversation I recently with Sen. Ed Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, reminded me that I had forgotten something utterly critical: Donald Trump’s decision to unilaterally disarm America in the face of the coronavirus invasion was urged upon him by an ostensible defender of American business: the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

When the pandemic reached America, we weren’t ready — any more than we were ready when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. But Trump had the tools to do what the U.S. has often done: make up for lack of preparedness. The crucial gaps to fill in March were supplies for testing to limit the spread of the virus, and medical equipment to treat those who got sick — testing kits, swabs, reagents, masks, gowns and gloves — by the billions. Government health agencies estimated that if the pandemic took hold, the country would need, for example, 3.5 billion N95 medical masks. We had 12 million.

Presidents have available, and have routinely used, the Cold War-era Defense Production Act to overcome such critical supply shortages— not just in wartime, but also to ensure adequate relief supplies after natural disasters. DPA can be used to put emergency purchases at the head of a supply chain, but also to require factories to convert their output to provide needed equipment in adequate volumes. Members of Congress urged Trump to appoint a military official as DPA czar to coordinate production and distribution of essential pandemic-related medical supplies, as was done in the Korean War.

In March, Trump was leaning towards robust use of the DPA, fashioning himself as a wartime president and the battle against the coronavirus as America’s “big war.” He invoked the DPA to require General Motors to speed up its production of ventilators. But he quickly discovered that he had an enemy within — not the virus as such, but the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Within days of Trump’s announcement that he would mobilize as if for war and use the DPA, the Chamber of Commerce’s lobbying army swung into action. Among the Chamber’s arguments: DPA would impose “red tape on companies precisely when they need flexibility to deal with closed borders and shuttered factories.” Unstated: if the government took charge of the supply chain for tests, masks and gowns, it could also prevent bidding wars from competing hospitals and states that would, and did, drive prices — and profits — through the roof.

In response, labor unions representing nurses, hospital staff and other frontline workers who were unable to be tested, or to obtain masks or gowns, protested and urged the Chamber to join a national mobilization to defeat the coronavirus. The appeal was not answered. On March 23, Markey and his Massachusetts colleague, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, wrote to the Chamber demanding an explanation. The Chamber’s response: Defense Production Act reliance was unnecessary, because “American companies will do whatever it takes to support America’s response to the pandemic and shore up the economy.”

But what the workers had feared — insufficient production, soaring prices and profits, chaotic delivery mechanisms — took over the health care market during the first wave of virus spikes in the Northeast. Some hospitals were paying 15 times the usual price for masks.

The Chamber continued its strenuous opposition to enabling the government to ensure an adequate supply of tests and PPE. Even Trump conceded that profiteering had taken over the market, and ultimately he did invoke the DPA to prevent it — but when it came to the export market.

Supplies increased, but often at exorbitant prices. Only when the shutdowns of most of the American economy brought the number of hospitalizations down sharply did supply and demand come into temporary balance. Americans believed that if there was a second wave later in the year, at least health care workers on the front lines would have the tools they needed.

Trump, denied by Chamber opposition of an easy pathway to acting like a heroic wartime president, seemingly lost interest. By June his focus had shifted from fighting the virus to reopening the economy and then reigniting the culture wars. Media headlines proclaiming his lack of interest didn’t even provoke “fake news” tweets from the East Wing of the White House.

The virus had a longer attention span. With major states like Florida, Texas and Arizona opening rapidly and prematurely, the holes in the jerry-built testing, tracing and quarantine systems each state had fashioned without federal guidance gave the virus its chance.

Cases — although not, initially, fatalities — began to soar. Suddenly, what any nationally coordinated effort would have been tracking and resolving all along — that the nation had stepped up production of tests, masks and gowns to meet the needs of an economy in shutdown, but had nowhere near the level of supplies for a massive second wave — came home to roost. By early July, new cases were flooding the hospital capacity of even some of the nation’s major health care centers, such as Houston.

In New Orleans, testing centers had to close eight minutes after they opened. In 100-degree heat in Phoenix, lines at testing centers were eight hours long. San Antonio and Austin were forced to limit testing to those with symptoms, leaving the system utterly unable to detect asymptomatic cases, when research suggests that to 40% of infections take place. Wait times for test results soared with caseloads, so that even those who got tested might not find out they were positive until they were well past the contagious stage.

Nurses were again forced to use one N95 mask for weeks at a time. Prices for what was actually available soared. States reported they could only fulfill 10% of their orders. Even now, in July, the U.S. has nothing like the 3.5 billion N95 masks that we knew in January we would need. Indeed, how could we? No manufacturer could have guessed in March how severe the crisis would be by fall. With no one managing the system, it was clearly foolish for any private company to produce, on speculation, several billion masks. Market signals cannot prepare America for the massive increase in possible scale required by such a pandemic. Nor can individual cities and states trigger the necessary ramp-up of supplies. Only a systematic national plan designed to ensure that we were ready for the worst-case scenario could have protected us.

Inevitably, the “market solutions” favored by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce have failed America not once but twice. In failing, they have taken the nation’s economy over the precipice into a deep, long, economic decline. That the loudest voice claiming to represent U.S. business chose to defend profiteering, embrace short-term thinking and risk the collapse of the American health care system and economy is both shameful and shocking.

And that most Americans, including me, had already forgotten this is scary. This is not the first time the Chamber has successfully pursued policies that put us enormously at risk — for years it has been one of the major forces preventing Washington from adopting even the most modest efforts to accelerate a transition off fossil fuels to save lives and protect the climate. But if the Chamber can get away once again with having caused massive economic damage while risking the health of millions, and with its public reputation unscathed, it’s unlikely to change its behavior.

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opensecrets 720

tikTok deploys lobbyists tied to Trump, top Democrats as US considers ban

TikTok is one of the most popular and fastest-growing apps in the U.S. But unless its pricey lobbying campaign pays dividends, the video sharing app’s time in the limelight could be coming to an end. Both President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo have said the U.S. is considering banning TikTok, which is run by the Chinese company ByteDance, amid concerns that users’ data could be shared with the Chinese Communist Party.

_{Read More}_

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jim h

https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/meet-the-true-trump-loyalists-influence-peddlers-practicing-the-dark-art-of-bending-government-power/

the Donald is in a funk. He’s been outsmarted by an inert virus. His poll numbers are tanking, and even his demagogic pep rallies are falling flat.

So, who to turn to for political comfort? Why, of course, Trump’s true loyalists: his diehard cadre of Washington’s corporate lobbyists. I don’t merely mean those elites of K-Street and Wall Street who dominate his Cabinet, constituting the official Trump government of, by, and for corporate greed. He also has a “kitchen cabinet.” Operating out of public view, it’s an unofficial collection of highly paid influence peddlers who’re still practicing the dark art of bending government power to the wishes of selfish corporate interests. Each of them is paid hundreds of thousands of dollars a year by brand-name clients — from Amazon to Walgreens — to get favors from Trump. In turn, these little-known lobbyists have now adopted The Donald as their chief client, funneling millions of special-interest dollars into his reelection campaign with the understanding that he’ll keep channeling tax breaks, regulatory exemptions and public dollars to the corporate donors. It’s the Washington money-go-round, merrily corrupting our government.

Who are these no-name corrupters?David Urban is one, considered the best-connected corporate huckster in the Trump swamp. He’s an old college pal of both Pentagon chief Mark Esper and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Moreover, he’s become such a close buddy of Donald himself that he’s known as a “Trump Whisperer,” able to work around the furies that rage in that strange orange head.

Such cozy ties to the top mean Urban gets his calls returned, an invaluable asset for his favor-seeking clientele, including Raytheon, Goldman Sachs, Bayer, Nike and Toyota. They, in turn, have made Urban rich, paying the once-obscure lobbyist more than $25 million since the Trumpeteers took office. And why wouldn’t they? For example, in 2019 the giant weapons makerRaytheon wanted to sell several billion dollars’ worth of missiles to Saudi Arabia’s royal rulers, but there was a congressional ban on such sales. No problem: (1) Raytheon enlisted Urban as their fixer; (2) he asked his pal Pompeo to meet with Raytheon’s CEO; and (3) voila! — the arms dealer promptly got a state department waiver to make the sale.

So, Washington lobbyists like Urban are now the top strategists and fundraisers for Trump 2020, hoping to get another four-year ride on the corrupt money-go-round.

During today’s COVID-19 crisis, the PR departments of every brand-name corporation are running slick ads nobly proclaiming: “We’re all in this together!”

Simultaneously, the corporate lobbying departments are ignobly using the public’s focus on the health crisis as cover for selfishly grabbing government favors for the corporation — everyone else be damned. And Trump’s totally corporate White House has been their corrupt cohort, serving as a front-end loader for everything from more corporate tax giveaways to jiggered labor rules that stiff workers.

One of the grabbiest special interests are well-off corporate and parochial private schools, where students from some of America’s wealthiest families get their education. For years, the nonpublic entities have been lobbying relentlessly to make taxpayers finance their schools, even though the schools are not open to all and usually have a narrow ideological or religious curriculum — including some extremist courses teaching that public schools should be eliminated.

That extremist nook is where Betsy DeVos resides. She’s a multibillionaire heiress and long-time funder of far-right causes. Chosen by Trump to run America’s education department, she’s been trying — by hook or crook — to run our schools straight into private hands… but with no success. Along came the COVID-19 federal relief package, including funds to help meet the education needs of low-income students in hard-hit public schools.

Hallelujah! shouted DeVos, grabbing the coronavirus as a way to advance her ideological agenda. In May, she issued an edict from on high requiring local public school districts to divert millions of the relief dollars from their disadvantaged students, forcing them to share their allotment with even the richest private schools. Astonishingly, Trump’s haughty education secretary rationalized her directive as a matter of economic fairness, piously informing locals that they must not “discriminate” against the rich.

DeVos’ “share-with-the-rich” dictum can be a bit imbalanced. Officials in New Orleans, for example, note that under her formula, 77% of its allotment would end up in private hands. Luckily, her “order” does not have the force of law, and public schools are fighting back. For information and action, go to the National Coalition for Public Education: NCPEcoalition.org.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/trump-connected-lobbyists-have-raked-in-10-billion-in-covid-19-aid-for-corporate-clients/

in yet another sign that the “swamp is alive and well in Washington, D.C.” despite President Donald Trump’s repeated promises to drain it, consumer advocacy group Public Citizen released a new report Monday morning identifying at least 40 Trump-connected lobbyists who have raked in over $10 billion in federal Covid-19 relief for their corporate clients since the pandemic began.

The dozens of lobbyists with ties to Trump through his campaigns, his administration, and/or his transition team “collectively have represented at least 150 clients on Covid matters,” Public Citizen notes in its new report titled “COVID Lobbying Palooza” (pdf). Those clients include such corporate behemoths as Pfizer, Comcast, McDonald’s, MasterCard, and American Airlines.

“The crisis offered an especially lucrative opportunity for those lobbyists who enjoy close ties to President Donald Trump and his administration—and they seized it,” reads the report, which briefly profiles all 40 of the lobbiysts and details some of their activities. “They have reported lobbying to obtain special industry carveouts for aid, government approval of their clients’ products and, most commonly, Covid-related aid across a myriad of programs.”

Public Citizen found that 27 clients of Trump-connected lobbyists have secured $10.5 billion in taxpayer coronavirus aid—a sum that is likely an underestimate because it does not include data from the $650 billion Paycheck Protection Program, which the White House has worked to keep under wraps.

the $10.5 billion total, according to Public Citizen “consists of $6.3 billion in grants, $4.2 billion in loans, and $67 million worth of support in the form of corporate bond purchases by the Federal Reserve.”

Five of the lobbyists identified by Public Citizen—including former Transportation Department official Geoffrey Burr and former Treasury adviser Jordan Stoick—”may have violated a Trump executive order that restricts lobbying activities by former officials,” the group said.

“In many cases, the forms indicate that the former officials’ agencies were directly lobbied,” the report reads.

Craig Holman, a registered lobbyist for Public Citizen and a campaign finance expert, told the Associated Press that the group is planning to file ethics complaints with the White House over the apparent violations.

“There does not appear to be anyone who is enforcing the executive order,” said Holman. The report says an investigation into the activity is warranted.

Arguing that sweeping reforms will be necessary to prevent such profiteering in the future, Public Citizen said “few scenarios would better embody most people’s image of the Washington ‘swamp’ than dozens of hired-gun lobbyists cashing in on their government connections during a public health emergency.”

“In the short term, the government, of course, should do everything it possibly can to offer the public an unobstructed window into the details of where the trillions in public dollars are going,” the group said. “In the long term, future administrations and the Congress should embrace systemic reforms to sever the conflicts of interest that incentivize government officials to favor the wealthy and well-connected over the constituents whom they are hired to serve.”

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https://www.opensecrets.org/news**/2019/12**/lobbying-firms-benefit-from-trump-ties/

For many well-connected Washington lobbying firms, business is booming after President Donald Trump’s 2016 election.

At least 22 lobbying firms saw revenue more than double in the Trump era compared to the previous three years, with many signing high-dollar contracts with big-name clients, an OpenSecrets analysis found.

The reasons for the revenue spikes vary. Some lobbying firms simply received a bigger check from existing clients or took on new ones as businesses were eager to influence the new administration. Others grew their team, recruiting well-connected lobbyists who brought their  existing clients to their new firms. Some firms touted connections to the Trump orbit, luring clients who wished to have the president’s ear.

Tapping into the Trump network

**Cove Strategies**, a Virginia-based lobbying firm founded in 2009 by conservative lobbyist Matt Schlapp, has been thriving since Trump took office. Schlapp, chairman of the American Conservative Union since 2014, is a vocal Trump defender on cable networks and regularly lobbies the president’s office. Trump frequently appears at the organization’s annual Conservative Political Action Conference. Schlapp’s wife, Mercedes Schlapp, served as Trump’s strategic communications director for two years and has now joined Trump’s reelection campaign.

The couple enjoy close access to the president, which in turn helped boost Matt Schlapp’s lobbying business. Cove Strategies’ revenue surged to $1 million in 2017 and has reached $1.3 million so far this year. The company is representing Verizon Communications on telecom and tax issues, and is lobbying on behalf of Walmart and several pharmaceutical companies. Ligado Networks, which filed a petition to urge the Federal Communications Commission to modify the company’s license so it could support 5G services for certain users, hired Cove Strategies to lobby the president’s office on mid-band spectrum and 5G issues.

D.C.-based firm **Fidelis Government Relations**’ revenue had never topped $500,000. But in 2017, the company brought in $1.2 million, more than tripling the revenue from the previous year.

The revenue hike came after Terry Allen, the company’s only lobbyist, partnered with Bill Smith, congressional chief-of-staff to now-Vice President Mike Pence for 12 years. Smith, who told Politico in 2016 that he offered Pence informal advice on his transition to VP, has been actively lobbying the vice president’s office on behalf of a handful of clients.

This analysis of fastest growing lobbying firms does not include some Trump-tied firms that didn’t exist before 2017 but are thriving under Trump, such as Ballard Partners....[hockey stick graf]

...

**Baker and Hostetler**, which already employed several “revolving door” lobbyists who previously held government positions, saw record-high revenue in 2017 after Jim Murphy, former political director of Trump’s presidential campaign, joined as a senior advisor. The same year, the company also represented social media giant Facebook and the powerful trade group Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America with six-figure contracts. 

**Kasowitz Benson Torres LLP**, the decades-old law firm of Trump’s longtime personal attorney Marc Kasowitz, also witnessed substantial business growth in recent years. The company hired former Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), who served as chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, to represent Chinese telecommunications giant ZTE Corp on national security-related issues last year. 

The hire came after U.S. intelligence suspected that the Chinese-government-tied company posed a cybersecurity threat. The company told OpenSecrets earlier this year that Lieberman was not advocating for ZTE but was merely making recommendations for the tech company.

Hopping on the wagon of firms selling Trump connections, **Federal Advocates**, which only had a bare bone team of lobbyists in 2016, gained huge profits in the Trump era. Michael Esposito, president of the firm, has more than two dozen clients. The formerly self-proclaimed “Democratic lobbyist,” who pitched himself to then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s campaign, is now touting his connections with the Trump administration and the Republican National Committee leadership despite lack of evidence, The Washington Post reported. 

The company saw its business quadruple since 2016, bringing in $3.2 million worth of contracts in 2017 from 33 clients including retail giant PetSmart Inc and the National Cannabis Industry Association. That is more than three times the $907,000 it earned in 2016. It picked up multiple revolving door lobbyists, including former Rep. Christopher Carney (D-Pa.) as the firm’s vice president. Carney left the company in October to join national law firm Nossaman.

Revolving door hires benefit some firms

It’s not only the Trump-tied lobbying firms that saw a boost in their revenue. Some firms also brought on board lobbyists with rich experience working for the government.

**Clark Hill PLC**, an international law firm, was hired by nine clients for a total amount of $618,000 in 2016. The following year, the firm saw a sevenfold increase in revenue, taking on 41 clients for $4.4 million. The company is now representing KBR Inc., a construction company that expressed interest in helping Trump build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.

In 2017, the firm hired Kevin Kelly, former staffer for then Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Ma.) and staff director of the Senate Appropriations Committee for almost a decade. Kelly immediately started to represent 34 clients, some of whom were clients when he worked for Washington lobbying firm Van Scoyoc Associates. Since joining Clark Hill, Kelly has lobbied on behalf of a variety of interest groups, ranging from higher education institutions to the public sector of Koch Industries.

Lauren Lipin, Kelly’s former colleague at Van Scoyoc Associates, joined Clark Hill PLC the same year, bringing several clients from her old job. Also a “revolver,” Lipin served as legislative assistant to Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger (D-Ma.) between 2009 and 2013.

The company recently recruited Anthony Campau, a former member of Trump’s transition team and chief-of-staff at the White House’s regulatory review office, to oversee its government regulation unit. Campau’s knowledge in policy making, Kelly said in a statement, would “enable us to help the firm’s clients in a way that few firms at the Federal level can offer.”

Also taking on big-name clients in recent years is **Hance Scarborough LLP**, a Texas-based lobbying firm with only $70,000 worth of contracts from four clients in 2016. The firm saw an exponential revenue increase over the past three years, bringing in $710,000 in 2017 and $1.6 million Kent Hance (D-Texas), who switched to be a Republican after stepping down, formed the firm in 1994. The former Texas congressman served as the chancellor of the Texas Tech University System and returned to lobbying after his retirement from the position in 2014. 

Former Rep. Jim Turner (D-Texas) joined the firm in 2017, immediately bringing in his former Texas-based clients as well as national and international organizations. Turner’s former legislative director, David Pore, rejoined the company with Turner in 2017 after five years as the firm’s attorney, lobbying on behalf of several groups including Pore’s previous employer, the Association of Texas Professional Educators.

Jay Stewart, the firm’s managing partner, said clients that Turner and Pore brought with them helped with the firm’s business. “More clients is better for any firm, because … that’s where you find future businesses with existing businesses,” Stewart said. “But we did not merge with (them) … for the purpose of gaining access to their clients.”

Hance Scarborough expanded its businesses in recent years. In 2018, the firm deployed multiple lobbyists to influence Congress on behalf of General Motors on automobile-related issues, including manufacturing, tax credits and trade deals.

**Skadden Arps**, an influential law firm that settled with the Department of Justice earlier this year over its work with former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort in Ukraine, is back on the rise, reviving its influence and building a team of revolving door lobbyists. After dropping to $100,000 in 2016, the company’s lobbying revenue bounced back to $1.4 million in 2017 and $1.5 million in 2018.

**Hall Render**, a national law firm with an expertise in health law, expanded its lobbying operation in 2017. John F. Williams, former press secretary of the House Government Reform Committee and the company’s only registered lobbyist at the time, was joined by Andrew Coats, who had served as the legislative assistant to former Rep. Mark Souder (R-Ind.) and the company’s counsel. The increased business that year also allowed the firm to bring on board another lobbyist, Williams said.

Williams said the business growth in 2017 reflected the acknowledgment of the firm’s expertise among its clients. “That just seemed to be the year everything clicked,” he said.

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escondido avocado guy

https://www.alternet.org/2020/06/contractors-for-trumps-controversial-3-billion-food-aid-program-hired-a-longtime-lobbyist-to-tout-their-work/

...

At least one contract has already fallen through. Ben Holtz, a California avocado grower who lacked a USDA produce-dealing license, saw his $40 million contract canceled on May 22. The USDA didn’t give a specific reason for yanking Holtz’s deal, but the federal government generally has broad discretion to back out of contracts.

Holtz said he plans to pursue the government’s dispute resolution process to seek USDA compensation for work he’d already done. “They owe me,” he said in a text message.

A USDA spokesman said no other contracts had been terminated and the agency will audit companies to make sure they meet the contract requirements.

Rep. Lloyd Doggett, D-Texas, said the USDA should also cancel the $39 million contract awarded to a San Antonio-area wedding planner called CRE8AD8 after the San Antonio Express-News reported inconsistencies in the company’s representations.

“This contract was issued without a credible background check with a company not licensed to perform and with no work history indicating a capacity to perform at a time of urgent public need for competent delivery,” Doggett said in a May 26 letter to Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue. “CRE8AD8 was given until June 30 to complete distribution of the 750,000 boxes in a seven-state region, but to date it has apparently failed to distribute a single box.”

A spokeswoman hired by CRE8AD8 to handle media questions said she was no longer working for the company. The company’s CEO, Gregorio Palomino, didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Lawmakers have also voiced concerns about how the Trump administration is implementing the $3 billion program.

“We share USDA’s goal of providing effective and timely assistance to families, farmers, and food supply businesses like food distributors,” Reps. Stacey Plaskett, Jim Costa and Marcia Fudge said in their own letter to Perdue, dated May 22. “We are concerned, however, that contracts were awarded to entities with little to no experience in agriculture or food distribution and with little capacity to meet the obligations of their award.”

The letter asks Perdue to explain how the USDA wound up picking contractors without relevant experience or proper licenses. Some organizations across the country reported difficulty working with unfamiliar distributors who won the USDA contracts. Meanwhile, well-established firms said their bids were rejected on mistaken grounds.

The Democrats also asked if the USDA thought about apportioning funding to regions based on population. Out of $1.2 billion in the program’s first round, just $46 million is going to the Northeast. Even though the region has the most coronavirus cases, it received the least money of any region except the Mountain Plains, which has almost half as many people. Maine and Alaska were left out of the program altogether. Food banks in the Northeast told ProPublica the imbalance makes it harder to find food for hard-hit communities.

The USDA said it’s evaluating how to reach “underserved” areas in future funding rounds.

The controversy mobilized some contractors who wanted to change the narrative. Apley declined to specify which companies he’s represented or what they’re paying him. He said the companies pay a membership fee to be in the coalition he represents.

While Apley is currently focused on shaping news coverage, he said direct lobbying of Congress could come later.

“Our initial interest right now is getting the story out,” he said. Lobbying “is a possibility being discussed as we proceed.”

Apley’s firm, Black Watch Agribusiness, advises companies on USDA contracting opportunities, according to its website. Apley has been a registered lobbyist on and off for two decades, including as recently as last year, according to congressional records.

Federal contracting rules prohibit using taxpayer dollars on lobbying or political expenses. Contractors are, however, free to use their own funds to lobby, and routinely do.

Trump, his daughter Ivanka and Perdue have personally praised the program. “USDA’s Farmers to Families Food Box Program is an example of Americans helping Americans, and something we should all be proud of,” Perdue tweeted on Thursday.

==

==

guk --> desmog 5/20

...fossil fuel companies have taken at least $50 million in taxpayer money they probably won’t have to pay back,according to a review of coronavirus aid meant for struggling small businesses by the investigative research group Documented and the Guardian.

A total of $28 million is going to three coal mining companies, all with ties to Trump officials, bolstering a dying American industry and a fuel that scientists insist world leaders must shift away from to avoid the worst of the climate crisis.

The other $22 million is being paid out to oil and gas services and equipment providers and other firms that work with drillers and coal miners.

Melinda Pierce, the legislative director for the Sierra Club, said: “The federal money Congress appropriated should be going to help small businesses and frontline workers struggling as a result of the pandemic, not the corporate polluters whose struggles are a result of failing business practices and existed long before COVID-19 entered the public lexicon.”

More than 40 Democratic lawmakers have argued that fossil fuel companies should not get any assistance under the coronavirus aid package.

Some Democrats have also warned the forgivable loans being made under Congress’ Paycheck Protection Program could be a transparency disaster.

Banks and lending institutions are distributing the money, so the government says it cannot track recipients in real time. The loans revealed have been made public only through news reports and securities filings by publicly traded companies, although the Federal Reserve has committed to issuing monthly reports.

So far, it’s clear the program is not working as intended. The funds are aimed at helping small businesses to keep paying their employees and covering other recurring expenses during the economic downturn. But they have been exploited by large companies forced to return the money amid a public outcry, including the Los Angeles Lakers, Shake Shack, and Ruth’s Chris Steak House.

The industry aid comes as the Trump administration is reportedly considering a broader bailout for oil and gas corporations, which were already under pressure before the coronavirus and have watched oil prices nosedive because of a global price war and low demand for gasoline. The U.S. government could make loans to oil and gas companies, essentially making taxpayers investors in the industry.

The Federal Reserve on Thursday also announced changes to its lending rules that could help indebted petroleum firms.

“The idea that oil workers are getting a paycheck is great,” said Jamie Henn, a spokesman for the Stop the Money Pipeline campaign who co-founded the environment group 350.org. “The worry is that the money’s going to the top and not going to filter down.”

The $50 million already paid to fossil fuel companies is a small fraction of the the $2.1 trillion Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act, known as the Cares Act. But the total assistance to the industry is likely much larger than can currently be tallied and will continue to grow.

Environmental advocates and oversight experts tracking the funds say it’s impossible to count how much of the money will assist fossil fuels, including because some firms provide services across multiple industries.

“All of this is voluntary disclosures by the companies,” said Jesse Coleman, a senior researcher with Documented. “No matter what, it’s going to be an incomplete picture of what’s going on.”

Coleman said in many cases the fossil fuel companies getting aid have made bad investments and “now they’re going to come crawling hat in hand and say: look at what the coronavirus did to us.”

Among the coronavirus aid recipients is Hallador Coal, an Indiana-based coal mining company that hired Donald Trump’s former environment chief Scott Pruitt as a lobbyist. The company’s former government relations director now works at the energy department. Hallador is taking $10 million to fund two months of payroll and other expenses.

Coal mining company Rhino Resources, which was formerly run by Trump’s Mine Safety and Health Administration head, David Zatezalo, is receiving $10 million.

Coal firm Ramaco Resources, whose CEO, Randy Atkins, is on the energy department’s National Coal Council, is getting $8.4 million.

The U.S. coal industry has been in steep decline, driven out of the market by cheap natural gas and environmental concerns. Trump campaigned on putting coal miners back to work, and his agencies have unsuccessfully explored ways to bail out coal companies, which are seeing their lowest employment levels in modern history. The Trump administration has also rescinded nearly all of the environment and climate protections the fossil fuel industry has opposed.

Fossil fuel companies can also take advantage of tax benefits under the coronavirus legislation, including deferring payment of social security and medicare taxes.

The Missouri-based Peabody Energy coal company has said it will speed up collecting an alternative minimum tax refund of $24 million to 2020 and defer $18 million of owed taxes.

U.S. taxpayers already subsidize the fossil fuel industry at roughly $20 billion a year, according to conservative estimates.

The Center for International Environmental Law has accused the oil, gas, and plastics industries of “exploiting the crisis by aggressively lobbying for massive bailouts and special privileges in a desperate attempt to revive an oil and gas industry already in decline.”

The Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis argues that federal lending to the oil and gas sector would be “a complete waste of money,” because it wouldn’t fix the industry’s underlying financial problems.

Oil industry lobbyists have pushed for changes at the Federal Reserve to let companies with large amounts of debt use its Main Street Lending Program and borrow to pay off existing loans.

In an April 15 letter to the Federal Reserve, the oil trade group the Independent Petroleum Association of America asked for the new provisions, saying “oil and natural gas producers are not looking for a government handout; they are seeking a bridge to help survive this economic disruption.”

Environmental advocates say the move would disproportionately benefit small and mid-sized oil and gas companies, such as Occidental Petroleum, which has nearly $80 billion in liabilities on its balance sheet.

Graham Steele, who directs the corporations and society initiative at Stanford Graduate School of Business, called the situation the “classic disaster scenario where an opportunistic administration and industry is taking advantage of a crisis.”

“And by the way, these are industries driving climate change. It’s both a bad financial proposition of the Fed and for taxpayers and a bad situation for the planet.”

==

https://www.ecowatch.com/european-green-deal-exxon-lobbyists-2645438998.html

The European commission's effort to transition the 27-country economic bloc from a high-carbon to a low-carbon emitter in a few decades received input from the fossil fuel giant ExxonMobil in the weeks prior to its passage, according to a watchdog that monitors lobbying activity, as The Guardian guk] reported.

As Common Dreams reported, a report released last week by InfluenceMap revealed that Exxon lobbyists met with commission officials in November to request an extension of the Green Deal's carbon pricing policy, known as the EU Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), to tailpipe emissions.

The report revealed that just ahead of the December announcement of the Green Deal, Exxon lobbyistsmet with Frans Timmermans, a member of the commission's cabinet, after the company avoided penalties for failing to attend a hearing on climate denial, as the EU Observer reported.

As InfluenceMap wrote in its report:

"In the meeting, the lobbyist for ExxonMobil tried to stall an overhaul of the transportation sector. ExxonMobil representatives pushed for the EU Commission to change its approach to climate regulation in the transport sector, including removing the EU's strict CO2 vehicle tailpipe standards, in what appears to have been an effort to stall a push towards electric vehicles. A direct extract from the meeting notes indicate the un-named ExxonMobil officials argued that the EU should: 'Give serious consideration to extending ETS (Emissions Trading Scheme) beyond stationary sources. Tail pipe emission legislation should be substituted with power plant to wheel emission regulation.'"

According to The Guardian, the maneuver aimed to tamp down knowledge about the carbon footprint of driving a combustion engine running on fossil fuels. And the lobbying effort seems to have worked, since the European Commission did not include plans to phase out combustion engines. It also did not include cars running on fossil fuels in its carbon-pricing plan.

Furthermore, the move aims to create unrest that would be politically unfeasible. The only way for a carbon-pricing plan for tailpipe emissions to be influential is for it to make greenhouse gas emissions very expensive. Yet, that type of action that transfers costs to consumers has been the bedrock of protests like the Yellow Vests protests in France, which stemmed from a proposed tax on diesel and gasoline, as the EU Observer reported.

Edward Collins, a director at InfluenceMap, said the document "represents yet another evidence piece" of ExxonMobil's efforts to protect its profits by thwarting meaningful regulatory action and shifting the focus to long-term technical solutions, as The Guardian reported.

The lack of decisive and meaningful regulatory actions that would change the transportation sector and the energy infrastructure of Europe in the immediate future drew the ire of climate activists, as EcoWatch reported. The Green Deal requires that European countries reach net zero carbon emissions by 2050, which many scientists say is too late to stop the climate crisis.

"Net zero emissions by 2050' for the EU equals surrender. It means giving up," Greta Thunberg and 33 other youth climate activists wrote in an open letter published Tuesday and reported by Reuters. "We don't just need goals for just 2030 or 2050. We, above all, need them for 2020 and every following month and year to come."

As Common Dreams pointed out:

"Exxon's attempt to further weaken the European Green Deal represents 'a shift from the propagation of climate science denial towards a range of more subtle tactics and narratives to distract policymakers and the public away from an urgent and robust policy intervention on climate on the scale recommended by the IPCC's 2018 special report on 1.5 [degrees Celsius] warming,' said InfluenceMap."

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European Commission Proposes Sweeping European Green Deal

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ew 1119

EU Parliament Declares ‘Climate and Environmental Emergency’

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https://www.opensecrets.org/industries/recips.php?cycle=2020&ind=E01

12/19 top 20

Top 20 Recipients

Rank Candidate Office Amount

1 Cornyn, John (R-TX) Senate $388,670

2 McCarthy, Kevin (R-CA) House $299,095

3 Gardner, Cory (R-CO) Senate $298,241

4 Scalise, Steve (R-LA) House $245,230

5 Daines, Steven (R-MT) Senate $192,586

6 McConnell, Mitch (R-KY) Senate $177,155

7 Pfluger, August (R-TX) $170,550

8 Cassidy, Bill (R-LA) Senate $164,675

9 Trump, Donald (R) $160,257

10 Inhofe, James M (R-OK) Senate $143,450

11 Brady, Kevin (R-TX) House $141,050

12 Crenshaw, Dan (R-TX) House $140,421

13 O'Rourke, Beto (D) $130,645

14 Collins, Susan M (R-ME) Senate $119,550

15 Cuellar, Henry (D-TX) House $115,032

16 Sullivan, Dan (R-AK) Senate $111,850

17 Tillis, Thom (R-NC) Senate $102,934

18 Fletcher, Lizzie (D-TX) House $94,128

19 McSally, Martha (R-AZ) Senate $91,416

20 Cheney, Liz (R-WY) House $88,200

==

==

...Again,Bernie McKay, the  AT&T lobbyist who had joined Intuit in the late 1990s and outlasted multiple CEOs, led the company’s campaign. In response to the Obama threat, McKay and Intuit’s small army of outside lobbyists turned to Congress, where lawmakers friendly to the company introduced a series of bills that would elevate Free File from a temporary deal with the IRS to the law of the land.

Republicans have historically been the company’s most reliable supporters, but some Democrats joined them. Rep. Zoe Lofgren, the California Democrat whose district includes part of Silicon Valley, has introduced or co-sponsored five bills over the years that would codify the Free File program, with names like the Free File Permanence Act. Lofgren’s spokesperson told ProPublica that the congresswoman believes the IRS, because of its role as tax collector, should not also be the tax preparer.

Hedging its bets, the company also sought to make sure the IRS could not spend a single dollar creating a public filing system. One internal document says Intuit would “advance legislative language in House Appropriations for ‘No Funds’ restriction on IRS spending” on such a system. It worked. Within a few years, Congress passed a 3,000-page appropriations bill that included a single sentence crucial to Intuit’s financial future: “No funds,” the law decreed, could be used “to provide to any person a proposed final return or statement.”

Another important aspect of Intuit’s influence strategy during the Obama years was covertly enlisting minority and women’s groups to press its case.

The internal 2014-15 “encroachment strategy” document discloses plans to “leverage trade groups to support House/Senate Free File bills.” It goes on to list the groups Women Impacting Public Policy, The Latino Coalition and the National Black Chamber of Commerce.

Intuit has given money to all of those groups over the years. All have signed letters urging Congress to make the Free File deal permanent. “The Free File program has been a clear success,” said one letter signed by The Latino Coalition and the Hispanic Leadership Fund.

A spokesperson for Women Impacting Public Policy said it has received $70,000 from Intuit. The amounts given to the other groups are unknown, and they did not respond to requests for comment.

Company documents also outline plans to “mobilize” a “coalition” that included think tanks and academics, who published op-eds.

Will Marshall, president of the pro-business Progressive Policy Institute,opposed return-free filing in an op-ed in The Hill because doing one’s taxes is “a teachable moment [that] prompts us to review our financial circumstances.”

Anti-tax activist Grover Norquist, the most consistent champion of Intuit’s policy positions, warned that “big spenders in Washington, D.C. want to socialize all tax preparation in America.”

It is unclear whether they were paid by Intuit or the Free File Alliance.Norquist didn’t respond to a request for comment, and a Progressive Policy Institute spokesman declined to say whether Intuit gave the group money.

Whatever external challenges to the status quo Intuit has faced, the company has been able to rely on the IRS’ continuing enthusiastic support of the Free File program. Every few years, the IRS and the industry got together to renew the deal....[long]

==

main rev dr is congress to k street lobby?

https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2019/10/congress-to-k-street-176-members

congress to K Street: 176 members left for influence gigs over last decade

Over the last decade, at least 176 members of Congress joined the influence industry. A majority of those former lawmakers took their talents to K Street lobbying firms or major law firms that engage in federal lobbying work. Read More

Over the last decade, at least 176 members of Congress joined the influence industry, according to a new report from OpenSecrets that focuses on “shadow lobbying” and the revolving door. 

Leaving Congress for lobbying or consulting work is bipartisan. Since the 111th Congress, which ended in January 2011, 94 Republicans took a spin through the revolving door as did 81 Democrats.

A whopping 26 of the 29 members of last Congress to join the influence industry were Republicans — a lopsided number driven by a wave of Republican retirements ahead of House Democrats’ sweeping win in November. The reverse happened during the red wave in 2010, when 40 of the 56 members who went through the revolving door were Democrats.

A majority of the former members took their talents to K Street lobbying firms or major law firms that engage in federal lobbying work.

Powerhouse lobbying firms Squire Patton Boggs and Akin, Gump are the top collectors of congressional talent, taking in five former members each since the 111th Congress. To kick off 2019, Squire Patton Boggs hired former Reps. Bill Shuster (R-Pa.), who retired at session’s end, and Joe Crowley (D-N.Y.), the fourth-ranking Democrat who lost in a primary upset to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The firm also retains former House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) as an unregistered adviser.

DLA Piper, Venable, Cannae Policy Group, Greenberg Traurig and King & Spalding each hired four members of Congress each over the same time period.

High-ranking members of Congress have no trouble finding high-paying jobs where they can leverage their extensive experience and connections.

Former House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) received a seven-figure job at financial firm Moelis & Company, which advises corporations on strategic decisions. Former House Appropriations Committee Chairman Dave Obey (D-Wis.) worked as an adviser for Gephardt Group after retiring from Congress in 2011. Former House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Ed Royce (R-Calif.), who read talking points from Saudi Arabia on the House floor, became policy director for Brownstein, Hyatt, which lobbies for the Middle Eastern country.

None of those three representatives registered as lobbyists for their new gigs. But OpenSecrets’ analysis found that representatives on average are more likely to register as lobbyists than senators. Forty percent of senators joining the influence industry registered to lobby compared to 55 percent of representatives. 

The revolving door is nothing new, but an increasing number of lawmakers are trying to shut it through new policies, including Democratic presidential contenders Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders.

Warren’s plan bans presidents, vice presidents, members of Congress, federal judges and cabinet secretaries from ever becoming lobbyists and limits other federal employees. It also attempts to expand the definition of a lobbyist to any individual paid to influence government.

This week, Sanders released his plan to stop Washington corruption, which includes a ban on lobbying from former members of Congress and their senior staffers.

“Congress cannot represent their constituents while special interest groups have the ability to influence decisions with corner offices and lucrative job offers,” Sanders said in a press release.

Lobbying experts say a ban on lobbying for former members — unlikely to pass Congress and survive the courts as it is — would actually encourage “shadow lobbying” if lobbying disclosure laws are not made more rigorous.

:{Click here:(style="box-sizing:inherit;max-height:1e+06px"):}: to explore a searchable list of revolving door members. 

https://www.politico.com/story/2019/04/11/gregory-craig-lobbying-foreign-interest-1271840

Prosecution of former White House counsel sets K Street on edge — again

:{

}:

Charges against Gregory Craig over working with foreign interests follow the high-profile case of Paul Manafort.

By THEODORIC MEYER

04/11/2019 09:21 PM EDT

Robert Mueller’s investigation is over. But the government crackdown on unregistered foreign agents may be just getting started.

The Justice Department’s _{indictment of Gregory Craig}_, who served as White House counsel under President Barack Obama, on Thursday sent a clear signal to K Street that lobbyists who work for foreign interests without registering have reason to be afraid.

Some Washington lobbyists have been on edge since Mueller indicted Paul Manafort, President Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman, in 2017 on charges of violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act, previously a rarely enforced law requiring lobbyists and others who work on behalf of foreign governments and political parties to disclose their activity to the Justice Department.

Though Mueller’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election has concluded, the Justice Department last month signaled its willingness to continue prosecuting potential violations of foreign lobbying law by tapping Brandon Van Grack, a former prosecutor on Mueller’s team, to head its FARA unit. Craig’s indictment is likely to reverberate on K Street as the crackdown continues, according to half a dozen Washington lawyers who have advised clients on complying with the law.

A letter from the FARA enforcement unit now “has to be taken as seriously as a heart attack,” said Matthew Sanderson, a lawyer at Caplin & Drysdale who advises clients on the law.

Craig was charged with misleading the Justice Department about his role in writing a report in 2012 on the prosecution of Yulia Tymoshenko, a former Ukrainian prime minister, while he was a partner at the law firm Skadden Arps Slate Meagher & Flom. Manafort arranged to hire Skadden on behalf of the Ukrainian government, although a Ukrainian oligarch paid most of the firm’s fees, according to the indictment.

##

When the report was finished, Craig helped to promote it to reporters in Washington and gave interviews to them. When the Justice Department sent a letter to Skadden to determine whether Craig’s actions meant he needed to register as a foreign agent, Craig made “false and misleading statements” to avoid registering, according to the indictment.

Craig has maintained he did nothing wrong.

“I did not participate in a scheme to mislead the government or conceal material facts,” he said in_{a video statement}_ posted to YouTube on Thursday. “I was always honest about the reasons for my contacts with the media. This prosecution is unprecedented and unjustified. I am confident that both the judge and the jury will agree with me.”

But Skadden_{admitted in a settlement}_ in January that the firm had misled the government and agreed to pay nearly $4.7 million it had earned for the work as a penalty. “We have learned much from this incident and are taking steps to prevent anything similar from happening again,” the firm said in a statement at the time.

David Laufman, a former chief of the Justice Department’s counterintelligence section who oversaw FARA enforcement, said the prosecution of Craig was likely to lead other law firms and public relations shops to be more careful.

“The cost of not doing so now is potentially devastating,” said Laufman, who now advises clients on complying with the law.

Skadden isn’t the only firm that’s suffered as the government has cracked down. The Podesta Group, one of the top lobbying firms in Washington, collapsed in 2017 shortly after Manafort’s was charged with breaking foreign lobbying law.

While the Podesta Group didn’t face any charges, the firm retroactively registered for lobbying work it did with Manafort and his deputy, Rick Gates, on behalf of the Ukrainian government.

LEGAL

Grand jury indicts former Obama White House counsel Gregory Craig

By DARREN SAMUELSOHN

The Justice Department is also prosecuting Bijan Kian, a former business partner of President Donald Trump’s onetime national security adviser, Michael Flynn, on charges of violating FARA. And a Maryland man, Nisar Ahmed Chaudhry, pleaded guilty last year to failing to register as an agent of the Pakistani government.

Unlike those men, however, Craig is a longstanding member of the Washington establishment — a Yale Law School graduate who worked in two White Houses and as an aide to the late Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) between stints in private practice. His indictment as part of the FARA crackdown signals “there’s really no scalp that is too high-profile for them to go after,” said Sanderson, the Caplin & Drysdale lawyer.

Lobbyists are often reluctant to register as foreign agents, in part because doing so requires them to disclose their meetings and phone calls with government officials in more detail than if they register under domestic lobbying rules. And lawyers such as Craig who don’t lobby may not want to register at all if they can help it.

“I don’t want to register as a foreign agent under FARA,” Craig wrote in a 2012 email to another Skadden partner cited in the indictment. “I think we don’t have to with this assignment, yes?”

The Justice Department’s willingness to go after Craig underscores that lobbyists need to be careful not only to make sure they register as foreign agents if necessary, but also to answer follow-up inquiries from the government carefully, lawyers said.

“Sometimes it really is the fact that the cover-up is worse than the crime,” said Joshua Rosenstein, a lawyer at Sandler Reiff Lamb Rosenstein & Birkenstock who advises clients on complying with FARA. “It’s unclear that any of this would have happened if Mr. Craig was forthright with the government to begin with.”

Many firms “are no longer quite as willing to take risks or operate in gray areas,” Rosenstein added.

The fear of a crackdown has led to a surge in demand for lawyers with FARA expertise. Thomas Spulak, a lobbyist at King & Spalding who also advises clients on FARA matters, said on Thursday that he’d been on the phone with a client trying to figure out whether to register as a foreign agent right before taking a call from a reporter.

WHITE HOUSE

Republicans confront Trump amid cascading controversies

By BURGESS EVERETT and ELIANA JOHNSON

Two lawyers said they expected the Justice Department to look into companies with ties to Chinese, Russian and Middle Eastern countries as part of the crackdown, as well as nonprofits with potential foreign ties.

Some lobbying and public relations firms have started to register as foreign agents as a precautionary measure even if they might not be strictly required to do so.

The public relations firm Burson Cohn & Wolfe registered as a foreign agent to represent Huawei, the embattled Chinese telecommunications company, last month even though some firms working for Huawei in Washington have elected to register under less-stringent domestic lobbying rules.

“It is our understanding that Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. is a private, employee-owned company,” Burson noted in its disclosure filing. “That understanding and our responses to Question 8(b) above are based on publicly available information. We have requested, but have not obtained, confirmation of this information from Huawei.”

Registering and complying with FARA may be less painful than not doing so now, Rosenstein said.

“It seems to be increasingly palatable for many firms to incur the compliance burden when the alternative may be a very public prosecution,” he said.

This article tagged under:

• Justice Department
• Barack Obama
• Donald Trump
• Donald Trump 2020
• Robert Mueller
• Lobbyist
• Gregory Craig
• Paul Manafort
• Foreign Agents Registration Act
• Mueller Investigation
• The Mueller Report

https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2019/06/efforts-to-reduce-drug-prices-stall-amid-pharmaceutical-lobbying/

Prescription drug prices are too high — there is a bipartisan consensus on that much in Washington, as recent estimates suggest that the average American spends about $1,200 on prescription drugs each year.

But ambitious legislation designed to curtail these rising costs is stalled as pharmaceutical companies spend tens of millions of dollars lobbying against the measures.

Drug manufacturers spent $52 million on lobbying in the first quarter of 2019 after spending $169 million on lobbying the previous year. A total of 116 companies and associations have lobbied on behalf of the industry so far in 2019, with 692 individual lobbyists.

The Pharmaceutical Research & Manufacturers of America, a trade group representing three dozen drug companies, was the third-largest lobbying client across all industries during the first quarter of 2019. The group spent $10 million to deploy 163 registered lobbyists, 70 percent of whom have been through the revolving door.

One target of pharmaceutical lobbying was a bill introduced by Sens. John Cornyn (R-Texas) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) in May. The Affordable Prescriptions for Patients Act would have classified certain patent practices as anticompetitive, making it easier for the Federal Trade Commission to bring lawsuits against drug companies that tried to block outgeneric alternatives.

An example often cited by proponents of stricter patent regulation is the drug Humira. The drug, which is used to treat several autoimmune diseases including rheumatoid arthritis, was approved for medical use in 2002, and its rights are controlled by the Chicago-based company AbbVie. According to testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee in May, AbbVie obtained more than 50 new patents on Humira in 2015 and 2016, shortly before it was set to go on the market. The new patents meant that the drug will not face competition from generics in the U.S. until 2023.

“Drug companies have taken advantage of the patent system to maintain their monopoly on certain drugs and prevent generics from coming to market,” Cornyn said in a statement when his office announced the bill. “These tactics mean Americans are forced to pay more for the life-saving medications they need. This bill puts patients first and reforms the system to encourage the availability of cheaper generics.”

Drug manufacturers were particularly concerned about Cornyn and Blumenthal’s bill because of the potential for increased lawsuits, Bloomberg Government reported.

After backlash from the pharmaceutical industry, Cornyn said on Tuesday that the bill would see changes. Bloomberg Government reported that the Texas senator planned to modify the legislation to focus on the powers of the FDA, rather than the potentially stronger enforcement mechanisms of the FTC — a win for drug companies.

A spokeswoman for Cornyn said the changes would be minor.

“One section of the legislation is being modified to give the FDA authority to go after certain abusive behaviors and limit what drug companies can do to wrongfully keep competitors from coming to market,” the spokeswoman said. “There’s more than one way to skin this cat, and this approach will achieve the same goal of lowering prices by giving authority both to the FTC and the FDA. We’re optimistic we can better achieve bipartisan consensus and move the legislation forward in the Senate with this minor change.”

In addition to their vigorous lobbying efforts, drug manufacturers are major campaign donors to politicians on both sides of the aisle. The three biggest pharmaceutical PACs, Pfizer, Amgen and AbbVie, gave more than $2.6 million to federal candidates during the 2018 midterm cycle, including a combined $3,000 to Cornyn. Blumenthal received $7,000 from Pfizer and $1,000 from Amgen during the 2016 cycle, when he was up for reelection.

Pharmaceutical lobbying is likely to continue, as the Affordable Prescriptions for Patients Act was just one bill in a flurry of legislation designed to address high drug costs.

In late May, Sens. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) and Patty Murray (D-Wash.) introduced a more comprehensive bill that targets drug prices as well as other healthcare issues such as surprise billing. Last week, Reps. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), Debbie Mucarsel-Powell (D-Fla.), Doug Collins (R-Ga.) and Ben Cline (R-Va.) introduced a bill that seeks to allow for more generics by increasing the burden of proof for companies seeking additional patents on an existing medication.

One notable piece of legislation on drug prices passed in 2018, a bipartisan bill that removed gag clauses for pharmacists, allowing them to tell customers when it is cheaper to pay for prescriptions without using insurance.

619 an

As he blocks election security bills, Mitch McConnell takes checks from voting machine lobbyists

written by June 12, 2019

This article was written by Donald Shaw and reprinted from Sludge, which produces investigative journalism on lobbying and money in politics. In 2016, Russian hackers targeted voting systems in 21…

This article was written by Donald Shaw and reprinted from Sludge, which produces investigative journalism on lobbying and money in politics.

In 2016, Russian hackers targeted voting systems in 21 states and, according to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report, breached systems in Illinois and two counties in Florida, gaining access to information on millions of registered voters. In his report, Mueller described the Russian government’s interference in the 2016 elections as “sweeping and systematic.”

Three years later, security experts warn that not enough has been done to address vulnerabilities in the U.S. election system. The director of the Federal Bureau of Investigations recently told Congress that “the threats just keep escalating,” adding that he viewed the 2018 midterms as a “dress rehearsal for the big show in 2020.”

In fourteen states, some 2018 midterm voters submitted their votes on touchscreens that did not produce paper trails necessary to verify their votes or audit election outcomes. If votes had been inaccurately processed in these precincts—whether through equipment errors or foreign hacking operations—election officials wouldn’t have been able to find or correct the problems.

Several Democratic and Republican members of Congress have submitted legislation to shore up election security. Proposals from Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) and Rep. John Sarbanes (D-Md.) include replacing paperless electronic voting machines with hand-marked paper ballots and optical scanners, subjecting voting equipment vendors to rigorous cybersecurity standards, and requiring vendors to report cybersecurity incidents.

But all the bills have hit a roadblock. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has reportedly told his colleagues that he will not allow the Senate to vote on election security legislation this session

“At this point I don’t see any likelihood that those bills would get to the floor if we mark them up,” Senator Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) said recently when asked by Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) whether the Rules Committee, which Blunt chairs, would mark up any election security bills. The Hill asked McConnell’s office about Blunt’s comments regarding election security and was referred to the majority leader’s verdict on the Mueller report: “case closed.”

Senator Wyden told Sludge he thinks McConnell does not want to make elections more secure.

“The only logical conclusion is that Senator McConnell wants American elections to be vulnerable to hackers and foreign interference,” Wyden said. “It is unconscionable for Republicans to stick their heads in the sand and do nothing after what happened in 2016. If Congress doesn’t act, it’s only a matter of time before hackers successfully interfere again.”

The two largest voting machine vendors in the U.S., Election Systems & Software (ES&S) and Dominion Voting Systems, together supply more than 80% of the nation’s voting machines. The companies have operated extensive lobbying operations in states for years, and both companies recently hired new lobbyists to represent them at the federal level.

ES&S hired lobbying firm Peck Madigan Jones in Oct. 2018 and paid it a combined $150,000 to lobby the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives in the fourth quarter of 2018 and the first quarter of 2019. ES&S did not employ any federal lobbyists in 2017, and when they reported lobbying in previous years it was at a much lower level, spending just $10,000 in many quarters. Dominion Voting Systems, which was recently acquired by New York-based hedge fund Staple Street Capital, signed its first-ever federal lobbying contract in January 2019 with Brownstein Hyatt Farber and Schreck and has paid the company at least $30,000 so far to lobby Congress.

Several of the lobbyists working for ES&S and Dominion Voting Systems have recently made contributions to McConnell’s campaign and joint fundraising committee.

Brownstein Hyatt Farber and Schreck lobbyist David Cohen, who lobbies for Dominion Voting Systems on issues related to election security and monitors federal legislation for the company, gave McConnell $2,000 on March 31: $1,000 to his campaign committee and $1,000 to his joint fundraising committee. Lobbyist Brain Wild, who works alongside Cohen on the Dominion contract, gave McConnell $1,000 on the same day.

Emily Kirlin, a lobbyist for Peck Madigan Jones who lobbies for ES&S on election security and H.R. 1, gave McConnell’s campaign committee $1,000 on February 19, and her colleague who works with her on the contract, Jen Olson, gave McConnell $1,000 on March 4.

“It’s not surprising to me that Mitch McConnell is receiving these campaign contributions,” the Brennan Center for Justice’s Lawrence Noren told Sludge. “He seems single-handedly to be standing in the way of anything passing in Congress around election security, and that includes things that the vendors might want, like money for the states to replace antiquated equipment.”

“Mitch McConnell’s conflicts of interest in blocking any and all election security legislation is not only shameful, it is placing our democracy at risk,” Craig Holman, government affairs lobbyist at Public Citizen, told Sludge. “The conflicts of interest arise from more than the campaign contributions he is receiving from voting machine vendors—contributions which certainly appear to be a reward from the industry for letting them off the hook—but it is also a self-serving act for strictly partisan purposes.

“McConnell believes this foreign interference in our democratic process will again favor the GOP, and so he is doing everything possible to make sure that window stays wide open for those who seek to do harm to our political system,” Holman said.

McConnell’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Voting machine vendors like ES&S and Dominion Voting Systems are not currently subject to any specific regulations or mandatory security standards.

“In contrast to other sectors, particularly those that the federal government has designated ‘critical infrastructure,’ there is almost no federal oversight of private vendors that design and maintain the systems that allow us to determine who can vote, how they vote, what voters see when they cast their vote, how votes are counted, and how those vote totals are communicated to the public,” Noren told Congress recently in a testimony. “In fact, there are more federal regulations for ballpoint pens and magic markers than there are for voting systems and other parts of our federal election infrastructure.”

Several of the bills that have been proposed in Congress would subject them to regulation and oversight for the first time, and some could result in the companies doing less business with the states as they encourage the use of hand-marked ballots instead of machines.

A bill from Senator Wyden—the Protecting American Votes and Election Act (PAVE Act)—would, for the first time, establish minimum cybersecurity requirements that election equipment vendors would have to comply with in order for their equipment to be eligible for use in federal elections. The rules would be established by the Department of Homeland Security, and systems would have to be tested and certified by the Election Assistance Commission (EAC).

The PAVE Act would also require voting systems to use an “individual, durable, voter-verifiable, paper ballot of the voter’s vote that shall be marked and made available for physical inspection and verification by the voter before the voter’s vote is cast and tabulated.” And while the bill does not explicitly ban electronic systems for marking  paper ballots—something that both ES&S and Dominion Voting Systems have begun manufacturing—it specifies that funding it would give to states to replace their paperless systems could not be used “to acquire any electronic device that a voter can use to mark a paper ballot.”

If a paper ballot requirement were to become law, with or without a funding restriction such as the one included in Wyden’s bill, the increased costs and security risks of ballot-marking machines could make them less appealing to states looking to purchase new systems.

According to testimony from Alex Halderman, Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan, equipping a precinct with ballot-marking electronic devices costs about three times as much as equipping it with a truly paper-based system along with a dedicated electronic device for voters with disabilities. “Fortunately, the most cost-effective approach is also the most secure: hand-marked paper ballots counted using optical scanners,” Halderman stated.

Another bill being blocked by McConnell, the House-passed H.R.1, includes a paper ballot requirement and would subject vendors to additional new security regulations. Voting machine vendors would be required to follow cybersecurity best practices that would be issued by the EAC’s Technical Guidelines Development Committee, and they would have to report election cybersecurity incidents and response plans to the EAC. They would also be forced to submit their equipment to independent security testing, and the EAC would be empowered to decertify any equipment that does not meet its security standards.

“I don’t know why Mitch McConnell is staging a full roadblock of election security legislation,” Wyden said. “But it is clear as day that there are politicians in the country who view insecure voting equipment as a benefit that helps them win elections. Instead of defending Americans’ constitutional rights, they are looking at this issue from a purely cynical and political standpoint.”

https://www.alternet.org/2019/06/as-he-blocks-election-security-bills-mitch-mcconnell-takes-checks-from-voting-machine-lobbyists/

contractor direct line to trump brain // whitaker:

https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2019/05/24/how-one-company-used-fox-centric-pr-strategy-try-get-trump-give-it-lucrative-federal-contract/223793

omg

Fox News has unprecedented influence over President Donald Trump’s decision-making. Trump’s worldview is shaped by the hours of propagandistic and sycophantic programming he often watches in a day, as well as his private consultations with many of the network’s stars on a wide variety of topics. As a result, Fox’s commentators have at times dictated the president’s policy agenda and political strategy, harnessed the news cycle by directing his attention to their particular obsessions, provided staffers for his administration, and hand-picked the recipients of his pardons.

And now, the network is emerging as a platform that can determine who could receive hefty federal contracts.

The Washington Post reported Thursday that Trump has “alarmed” military commanders and Department of Homeland Security officials by aggressively lobbying them to grant a border wall contract to Fisher Industries, a North Dakota-based construction company whose CEO, Tommy Fisher, has regularly appeared on Fox and other conservative outlets to promote his company’s bid.

Fisher claims that his company can build a border wall both faster and cheaper than his competitors thanks to a patent-pending installation system, but the Army Corps of Engineers determined that Fisher’s design “did not meet its requirements and lacked regulatory approvals” and that the firm’s previous work on a barrier project “came in late and over budget,” the Postreported. Rejected through the procurement process, Fisher is trying to go around it through the right-wing media, a method that has allowed him to reach the president. Trump is now trying to sidestep the contracting process because, as Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-ND) explained to the Post, he “had seen [Fisher] on television” -- specifically on Fox -- “advocating for his version of the barrier.”

Fisher has used a Fox-centric PR strategy to directly pitch the president in hopes of obtaining a federal contract, making at least 10 appearances on Fox News and its sister network, Fox Business, since January 2018, according to a Media Matters review. Programs the president regularly watches, including Fox & Friends and The Ingraham Angle, have repeatedly granted Fisher an uncritical platform to shill for his company.

Fisher’s strategy mimics that of K Street lobbyists who pay off TV pundits to promote their messages during on-air appearances and lawyers who put their clients and their relatives on Fox to ask the president for pardons.

[https://www.washingtonian.com/2019/03/10/how-lobbying-has-changed-donald-trump-washington/

By the time of Donald Trump’s inauguration, Roger Dow realized he had a problem. Dow, president and CEO of the U.S. Travel Association, is the tourism industry’s top lobbyist in Washington. Over the previous two years, he’d grown increasingly troubled by some unfavorable trend lines: From 2015 to 2017, the United States was one of just two leading global tourism destinations that had experienced declines in incoming international travelers. Throughout the world, the market for overseas travel was expanding, and if America could simply have retained its share of visitors, domestic businesses would have gained, according to the association’s estimates, $31 billion in revenue and added 96,000 jobs. Instead, tourists were heading to Canada or the United Kingdom. (The only other destination to decline, Turkey, had been destabilized by a failed military coup.)

The development, Dow explains, was rooted in several forces, including a stronger US dollar, economic weakness in Latin America, and dirt-cheap airfare in Europe. But there was another factor, Dow says: “the Trump effect.” The 2017 executive order blocking entry to citizens from six majority-Muslim countries, and the President’s hostile proclamations about immigration, had signaled to foreigners they weren’t welcome here, even if they only wanted to spend money in Times Square and go home.

Dow put together a plan to reverse the decline. He assembled a collection of similarly affected Washington trade groups into what became known as the Visit U.S. Coalition, and its leaders identified specific policy fixes that they believed would ease the way for foreign tourists. More important, though, Dow and his allies were hoping for a stylistic change to accompany the policy tweaks: They wanted Trump to tamp down his language so as not to scare people away. Talking tough on national security was fine, Dow says, but it had to be coupled with the message that America still welcomed visitors from abroad. “The rhetoric,” he says, “is not balanced.”

Given all of Trump’s talk about expanding the economy, Dow was convinced that the President would embrace the industry’s recommendations—if only they could reach him. And therein lay the problem. In another administration, policy and rhetoric alike might have been worked up in a bureaucracy whose officials might be in a smart lobbyist’s Rolodex. In Trump’s government, though, the rhetoric came from the President’s own gut. Sharing policy insight with an agency functionary wasn’t going to help. They had to plant their talking points in front of POTUS himself. But how?

The coalition hired S-3 Public Affairs, one of the many DC lobbying-and-media-consulting firms scrambling to adjust to the city’s new power structure. In prior years, says S-3 partner Amos Snead, the firm might have designed an “outside-in” approach—collect letters or petitions from industry backers around the country, bring them to Washington, and use the testimonials to influence lawmakers, agency officials, and other thought leaders. Trump’s Washington, Snead believed, required a different approach. He sensed there might be a more direct path into the President’s head, via one of his favorite mediums: Twitter.

Snead used a technique known as geofencing to send digital ads via Twitter, as well as Facebook and You-Tube, touting the benefits of foreign tourism. Instead of targeting the entire capital, they were aimed at the coordinates of a vanishingly small audience: the President and his top aides, wherever they happened to be. The consultants tracked Team Trump’s movements inside the Beltway and beyond. When the commander in chief was in Washington, they sent their ads to IP addresses that covered the White House and the Trump hotel. If Trump headed to his golf club in New Jersey, they beamed the ads to IP addresses there. When he went to Mar-a-Lago, they sent them to his club in Florida.

As Snead puts it, “We’re following [Trump] where he goes.”

This tactic is part of what’s known, in the parlance of the industry, as the “audience of one” strategy—and tourism boosters aren’t the only people using it. In fact, it’s become a staple of the business of Washington under the 45th President.

...

Trump marched into Washington promising to “drain the swamp,” but his administration has been great for K Street. Total spending on lobbying reached $3.4 billion in 2018—the most in eight years.

Yet just because the influence industry is swimming in cash doesn’t mean its world hasn’t been rocked. Trump’s arrival in the White House has had a profound impact on the way K Street operates, according to interviews with more than 30 lobbyists, consultants, former administration officials, and others. In prior years, lobbyists and consultants felt compelled to work officials in all corners of the federal bureaucracy when trying to shape policy. But now, with decision-making consolidated inside the Oval Office, they’ve had to rewrite their playbook.

“It’s two different worlds,” says Eric Bovim, a managing director of Signal Group, a public-affairs agency in Washington. “Under President Obama, the government was a finely tuned instrument, all the parts working together to produce a single note. You needed to work with everybody to calibrate the sound. Today, for the most part, it’s a one-man band, the President in a never-ending guitar solo on the White House lawn, overpowering all the other instruments.”

From the beginning, pressing a case with Trump was difficult for a run-of-the-mill lobbyist: Veteran GOP influencers—the Establishment—didn’t have many friends in Trump’s inner circle. With the administration struggling to fill agency positions, even many well-connected consultants and lobbyists didn’t have a lot of other corners of the government to go to for help. Instead, the focus was on Trump.

HOW DO YOU GET TRUMP TO PAY ATTENTION TO POLICY? MAKE HIM THE STAR OF A COMMERCIAL.

In the early days, influence peddlers ran ads designed to appeal to him in New York newspapers—the Times, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post—which they believed he was still reading. They also used the peculiar way that other articles got to him.

One key discovery was the story folder. During at least the first seven months of the new administration, staffers in the White House communications department compiled flattering news stories about Trump into packets, which they delivered to the President twice a day. According to a former White House aide, as the packet made its way to the Oval Office, additional officials inserted other news articles they wanted the President to read. “It would typically be, like, Stephen Miller putting his latest race-baiting story in there,” the former White House aide says.

When consultants and lobbyists learned about the folder, they saw a fresh opportunity. One Republican consultant told me he was able to plant stories favorable to his corporate clients in Breitbart News—the far-right outlet once run by Trump’s former strategist, Steve Bannon—and then pass those stories to a friend in the White House, who in turn slipped them into the daily packet destined for the Oval. “If you have a friend in there who can get something on the Resolute desk,” the consultant says, “it doesn’t really matter what the source [of the information] is anymore.”

Others try to influence the thinking of the White House officials Trump listens to. One consultant told me he has geofenced the Kalorama home of Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump with digital ads in an effort to shape their views on an issue. Beyond the White House and Trump’s hotel, S-3’s influencers also targeted power restaurants such as Central Michel Richard in case a top aide popped in for lunch.

Special interests have begun targeting Trump’s “outfluencers” as well—people like Oklahoma billionaire Harold Hamm and ex–UK Independence Party leader Nigel Farage, who don’t work in the White House but are believed to have the President’s ear. One consultant went so far as to geofence the school of the child of a particular outfluencer with ads specifically designed to appeal to younger viewers. “If [the family is] sitting around the dinner table talking and the issue comes up,” the consultant told me, “I want that kid to be able to say, ‘Hey, I saw something about that.’ ”

The cornerstone of the audience-of-one strategy, though, is Trump’s love affair with television. After the election, consultants began buying commercial time during Fox & Friends, the conservative morning show that the President is known to watch religiously. But how do you get a 72-year-old man with no interest in policy to watch a commercial on ethanol subsidies? Well, the influencers decided, you find old footage of Trump discussing the issue on the campaign and make him the star of the commercial.

“The President’s favorite topic is himself,” says a Republican consultant. “What better way to get him interested in a message than by providing him with the thing that he’s most obsessed with?”

Snead used the tactic during his work for the Visit U.S. Coalition. In a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in early 2018, Trump declared to the roomful of elites that “America is open for business.” There it was—Snead’s money shot. He and his team immediately created a commercial that featured Trump saying the line. They then beamed the ad to the IP address they were using to geofence the President in Switzerland. “As soon as those words came out of his mouth,” Snead says, “we’re turning those into ads.”

..

]

The CEO has honed his pitch to appeal to the president in particular, as demonstrated by his March 5 appearance on Fox & Friends, during which co-host Ainsley Earhardt asked him to explain “why should the president, or why should his administration, choose your company?"

[vid]

Fisher first appealed to the president as a businessman, saying Trump should know that his company would do the work for less money than other companies, get it completed faster, and throw in access roads and other additions.

He went on to describe his company as “the first responder” of the industry, appealing to Trump’s well-known obsession with police officers and firefighters.

And he also tried to link the bid to one of Trump’s notable construction successes, the renovation of the Wollman Rink in Central Park in the 1980s. “I think he’ll understand,” Fisher argued, “just like the Central Park deal with the ice skating rink, if you need it done now, nothing against government bureaucracy, but it takes time, so you need an expert to come in there and do it now and do it right.”

Earhardt ended the interview by giving Trump another reason to prefer Fisher: “You might be able to build it just in time for that election, too.”

And Fox’s promotion of Fisher’s bid has not been limited to the network’s supposed “opinion” shows. On April 19, the network’s flagship “news” broadcast, Special Report, ran a packaged report that essentially served as an infomercial for Fisher’s proposal. Introduced by anchor Bret Baier and reported by national correspondent William La Jeunesse, the segment featured an interview with Fisher and credulously repeated his claims that he could construct the wall “faster, better, and cheaper."

[vid]

All of this laudatory coverage has had Fisher’s desired effect, with the president reportedly promoting the company’s bid in meetings with senior military and DHS officials and forcing them to explain “that the president could not just pick a company” to get the contract in defiance of the federal procurement process.

Fisher harnessed the incredible power of Fox’s hold on the president to get much closer than he should have to taxpayer dollars. He won’t be the last to try to do so.

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new 519

Koch Industries’ Federal Lobbying Rose 35 Percent in First Quarter of 2019

By Don Weiner — Koch Industries has lobbied against every major measure to reduce reliance on fossil fuels so far this year.

Read more >>

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As a Republican U.S. House member from South Carolina, Mulvaney took over $62,000 from payday lenders. This week he gave a speech to the American Bankers Association and told them how his office operated.

“We had a hierarchy in my office in Congress,” said Mulvaney. “If you’re a lobbyist who never gave us money, I didn’t talk to you. If you’re a lobbyist who gave us money, I might talk to you.”

Well, Mulvaney appears to have carried that policy, right into the nation’s most important consumer protection agency. In December 2017, Mulvaney abnegated his responsibility to protect consumers by deciding to indefinitely postpone the new payday lender rule.

rev dr

LOBBYING

Duke Energy hires White House veteran

Jeremy Dillon, E&E News reporter

Published: Friday, May 3, 2019

Two of Washington's largest energy influencers announced lobbying personnel changes this week. WHO?

PEOPLE

White House energy aide lands on K Street

Robin Bravender, E&E News reporter

Climatewire: Thursday, November 29, 2018

A veteran White House energy and environment official has left the administration for a lobbying gig.

Aaron Szabo, who worked on climate and energy policies in the Trump and Obama administrations, started this week at CGCN Group.

He'll be lobbying primarily on energy issues, according to CGCN spokesman Ken Spain. The group's clients include the American Petroleum Institute, Duke Energy Corp., TransCanada Corp., the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers, Devon Energy Corp., and NextEra Energy Inc.

Aaron Szabo. Photo credit: CGCN Group

Former White House aide Aaron Szabo. CGCN Group

"Aaron is one of the most experienced energy policy experts in D.C.," said Steve Clark, founder of CGCN. "We are proud to welcome him to the team after a decade of working on some of the biggest energy and environmental issues for both the Obama and Trump administrations."

Szabo was a career staffer in the White House from 2014 until he stepped down last week, according to his LinkedIn profile. He worked in the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs from 2014 until 2017, when he became an attorney at the Council on Environmental Quality.

His exit is "a big loss for the administration," said George David Banks, a former Trump White House official who focused on international energy policy. "He's an A player and he did a phenomenal job in helping promote the president's regulatory rollback policies."

Szabo worked closely in the White House with Mike Catanzaro, Trump's top domestic energy official who returned to CGCN in April, according to Banks.

"I tried to poach him and move him over to international because he's that good, and Mike put an end to that," joked Banks, who left the White House in February.

Szabo worked on the Obama administration's climate rules before he helped to overhaul them under Trump.

For example, he worked on Obama's Clean Power Plan before he assisted with the Trump team's proposed replacement, named the Affordable Clean Energy rule. He also worked on methane regulations for both administrations.

Prior to his time at the White House, Szabo spent nearly seven years as an analyst at the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

CGCN's energy team includes Jay Cranford, a former policy adviser to House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), and Mike Freeman, a former lawyer for the House Natural Resources Committee. Rosemarie Calabro Tully, former spokeswoman for the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee's top Democrat, Maria Cantwell of Washington, joined CGCN earlier this year.

loss

http://www.pfaw.org/blog-posts/confirmed-judges-confirmed-fears-trump-circuit-judge-tries-to-strike-down-lobbyist-registration-and-disclosure-law-as-applied-to-unpaid-lobbyist-on-free-speech-grounds/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=nl&utm_campaign=december2018

"Confirmed Judges, Confirmed Fears” is a blog series documenting the harmful impact of President Trump’s judges on Americans’ rights and liberties. 

Trump Eighth Circuit Judge David Stras dissented from an opinion by two other Republican-appointed judges in late November and argued that Missouri’s lobbyist registration and disclosure law violated the First Amendment as applied to an unpaid conservative lobbyist. The majority strongly disagreed with Stras’ attempt to expand the reach of decisions like Citizens Unitedand explained that the state’s interest in transparency and public disclosure of who is trying to influence legislation clearly warranted the minimal burdens imposed by the law.

Ronald Calzone is the president, director, and unpaid lobbyist for Missouri First, a conservative nonprofit organization that regularly lobbies members of the state legislature. He filed a First Amendment challenge to the Missouri lobbying registration and disclosure law. The law simply requires filling out a form and paying a $10 fee once each year, as well as filing additional reports concerning lobbying-related expenditures. The district court rejected his claim that the law was unconstitutional as applied to him as an unpaid lobbyist, and he appealed.

In Calzone v. Summers,Judges Steven Colloton and Bobby Shepherd, both appointed by President George W. Bush, affirmed the lower court decision, but Judge Stras dissented. The majority explained that it was improper to consider Calzone’s additional argument that he makes no lobbying-related expenditures, as Judge Stras did in dissent, because that argument had not been raised below or even in the court of appeals until oral argument, noting that Stras’ view to the contrary was “unfair” to the lower court and to the state. All three judges agreed that Citizens Unitedrequired “exacting scrutiny” of the law as applied to Calzone, but Stras claimed that the state’s interest in “transparency” was not enough.

The majority strongly disagreed, explaining that based on precedent, there was a strong interest in disclosure of who is “pressuring and attempting to influence legislators.” They also noted that even unpaid lobbyists could offer “things of value” to legislators, raising the state interest in “avoiding the fact or appearance of public corruption.” The burden of complying with the law was “minimal,” they stated, particularly if Calzone did not make lobbying-related expenditures as he claimed in the court of appeals.

Overall, the majority concluded, the state system was “precisely that which we have previously held would satisfy” the requirement that such a disclosure law have a “substantial relationship” to the state’s interests. Stras’ dissent, on the other hand, would have further extended efforts in Citizens United and similar cases to misuse the First Amendment to undermine important public disclosure laws.

Tags:

Confirmed Judges Confirmed FearsDavid StrasFighting Big Money in Politicslobbyingmoney in politics

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When it comes to the heat-trapping effects of global warming emissions, methane is 86 times stronger than carbon dioxide over a 20-year period. That's why it was promising to seefossil fuel companies commit to "advocate sound policy and regulations on methane" when they signed on to a set of guiding principles designed to curb methane emissions.

But have they lived up to their promise to work with governments on effective methane regulation? You guessed it—ExxonMobil, BP, and other Big Oil companies haven't just dropped the ball on methane; they're trying to roll it back.

Tell Big Oil to keep their promise and keep us safe from methane pollution!

Big Oil's biggest industry group, the American Petroleum Institute (API), met with the White House to lobby against strong methane inspection standards. So it wasn't surprising that, a few weeks later, the US Environmental Protection Agency proposed new methane standards that would significantly cut back requirements for fossil fuel companies to monitor and repair methane leaks.

Methane is emitted in large quantities during oil and gas production. Leaks and emissions from natural gas facilities pose a serious threat to our climate and our health. The new proposal would allow hundreds of thousands of tons of additional methane pollution by 2025.

The same companies that pledged to tackle methane emissions hand-in-hand with our government are paying lobbyists to do the opposite. As funders of API, ExxonMobil, Shell, BP, and Chevron should use their power to remove the lobbying group as barrier to safe methane rules. It's time to hold them to their word.

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https://www.alternet.org/we-need-healthcare-champions-not-puppets-documents-expose-big-pharmas-scheme-turn-democratic

a growing number of political candidates facing November elections proclaim their support for single-payer healthcare—which the majority of Americans want to replace the nation's current for-profit system—the Democratic primary for Hawaii's 1st Congressional District is shedding light on the insurance and pharmaceutical industry forces working against a transition to Medicare for All.

At least three of the six candidates running to represent the"reliably" Democratic district in Hawaii "took time out from their schedules to talk to a consultant dispatched by the Healthcare Leadership Council, a lobbying group that seeks to advance the goals of the largest players in the private healthcare industry," according to a new report by The Intercept.

Although much of the report focuses on the Hawaii race, as The Intercept notes, the Healthcare Leadership Council—which is funded by Big Pharma companies such as Pfizer and Novartis—spends more than $5 million a year representing the interests of "insurers, hospitals, drugmakers, medical device manufacturers, pharmacies, health product distributors, and information technology companies" across the nation.

The lobbying group reached out to and met with former state Sen. Donna Mercado Kim, Hawaii Lt. Gov. Doug Chin, and Honolulu City Council Member Ernest Martin, then crafted dossiers that included "their photos, biographical sketches, contact information for their campaigns, and a checklist for determining their positions on certain issues of importance to the Healthcare Leadership Council," based in part upon the candidates' answers to a survey about specific policy proposals.

The Intercept, which obtained and published the dossiers, reports:

Of Kim, the former state senator, the group's profile says, "She is very pro-market, opposes any attempt at single-payer, does not support price controls on pharmaceuticals, and agrees that Medicaid and Medicare need to be managed by the private market."

Chin is a "moderate Democrat that has represented healthcare providers in Med-mal lawsuits," said the Healthcare Leadership Council's profile. Chin, the survey noted, "supports the market concept advocated by HLC and does not think a single-payer/Medicare for All approach would work in Hawaii."

"Martin supports a majority of HLC's positions," the profile on the Honolulu City Council member says. "He does not want single-payer." But, the dossier noted, Martin needed better education on health policy.

In some cases, what the candidates told the lobbyist appeared to differ from what they told voters.

"Democrats running in a primary election will say they support 'Medicare for All,' but what do they say to lobbyists behind the scenes?" responded fellow candidate Kaniela Ing, a vocal supporter of Medicare for All and other progressive policies who did not meet with the healthcare industry lobbyists.

"We need healthcare champions, not puppets," added Ing, a state lawmaker and democratic socialist whose recent campaign ad has drawn national attention to the race.

People for Bernie, a collective formed in response to the 2016 presidential run of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.)—a longtime supporter of single-payer who introduced a Medicare for All bill in the Senate last September—turned to Twitter Thursday to share the report and urge progressives to help Ing get elected.

Of the other two candidates in the race, a spokesperson for Republican-turned-Democratic state legislator Beth Fukumoto told The Interceptthat the Healthcare Leadership Council had not contacted her campaign, and Ed Case, a former congressman and "Blue Dog" Democrat, did not respond to request for comment.

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https://www.ecowatch.com/fossil-fuel-lobbying-2588126755.html

Fossil Fuel Industry Outspent Environmentalists and Renewables by 10:1 on Climate Lobbying, New Study Finds

By Itai Vardi ...published Wednesday in the journal Climatic Change, Drexel University sociologist Robert Brulle shows that between 2000 and 2016, lobbyists spent more than $2 billion trying to influence climate legislation in the U.S. Congress.

Analyzing data from lobbying reports made available on the website OpenSecrets.org, Brulle found thatelectric utilities spent the largest sums during this timeframe followed by the oil, gas and coal industries, and transportation sector,respectively. Overall, lobbying by corporate sectors involved in the production or use of fossil fuels overshadowed that of environmental organizations and the renewable energy sector by a ratio of approximately 10 to 1.

Brulle acknowledges that the leading spenders do not take monolithic approaches and at times lobby in support of climate legislation.

"Different corporations typically push for whatever positions are advantageous to their economic well-being," writes Brulle. He says that further research is required to parse out the effect of such variable lobbying positions on climate legislation.

Though climate lobbying only accounted for 3.9 percent of the total amount spent on legislative lobbying between 2000 to 2016, its rates fluctuated considerably.Early on, relatively little money—only about $50 million, or 2 percent of all lobbying—was spent trying to sway federal legislators' opinions during the years leading up to and including 2006.

But in the years that followed, climate lobbying expenditures shot up, reaching a high point of $362 million in 2009, which accounted for 9 percent of all lobbying that year alone. The next year, 2010, saw only a slight drop, before climate lobbying efforts plunged, eventually reaching about 3 percent of total lobbying after 2011.

Of course, 2009 marked the year that the House of Representatives narrowly passed the landmark climate legislation, the American Clean Energy and Security Act, also known as the Waxman-Markey bill. However, that effort died on the floor of the Senate just over a year later.

To explain these fluctuations, Brulle argues that climate lobbying grows as the potential to enact climate legislation increases. This is especially true when one party, that has campaigned on passing climate legislation, controls government—findings that have troubling implications for American democracy.

"What we have is a group of unelected lobbyists representing special interests negotiating with Congressional Representatives on climate legislation," Brulle told DeSmog via email. "The minimal representation of environmental groups means that arguments for climate action to protect the common interest will be marginal considerations. Instead, special interests dominate the conversation, all working for a particular advantage for their industry. The common good is not represented."

...

https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2017/03/trumps-beachhead-hosts-dozens-of-former-lobbyists/

:{Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price has been mired in questions about his investments in the healthcare industry. As it turns out, some of the people helping him get grounded at the department are also prompting questions about their ties with the industry.

}:

Lance Leggitt, a lobbyist at Baker Donelson since 2006, was named Price’s chief of staff earlier this month. In 2016 alone, he lobbied for 10 organizations — all related to health care. Alere Inc:{, for example, manufactures diagnostic tests and spent nearly $900,000 lobbying last year. Other clients included hospitals and a medical trade group.

}:

Leggitt deregistered as a lobbyist in January, because he was on his way to HHS even before being made chief of staff. In the early days of the administration, Leggitt was a member of President Trump’s “beachhead” force,a temporary cast of characters brought in to keep the government running and lay the groundwork for Trump’s agenda.With key jobs in the administration being filled at a slower-than-average pace, these individuals can have a big impact on their agencies.

In response to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by ProPublica, the names of 400 of the more than 520 members of beachhead teams were released by the Office of Personnel Management — including several dozen individuals who have been federally registered lobbyists, a review by OpenSecrets confirmed.

Their positions can last 90 to 120 days, depending on the level, with one contract extension permitted — although many expect to be later hired on to full-time positions. That’s what happened with Leggitt, for example, and with Jack Kalavritinos, who was brought in on a beachhead assignment to help run FDA; that agency’s commissioner wasn’t named by Trump for close to two months. Kalavritinos worked at HHS in the mid 2000’s but more recently spent eight years lobbying for Covidien Ltd, an Ireland-based pharmaceutical and health products company. This week, Kalavritinos was named associate commissioner for external affairs at FDA.

While past administrations have used some temporary personnel, they didn’t seem to do so at the same scale as Trump’s, said Max Stier, president and CEO of the Partnership for Public Service, which helps advise new administrations. Most pushed to have officials in place much more quickly.

“There wasn’t a notion of a group of people that were only there for a limited period of time, but more of an expectation that the secretary and team would get in and be using the career folks,” Stier said. “The beachhead team creates another step in the process.” (The term “beachhead” was first used by Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign; he didn’t get the chance to implement the concept.)

It also creates “minders” of a sort who aren’t always appreciated by agency chiefs or civil service employees trying to do their work.According to the *Washington Post*, these temporary figures often act as eyes and ears for the White House, making sure the agencies are loyally hewing to the administration’s agenda.

Now, some of the beachheaders with lobbying backgrounds did that work many years ago and went on to other careers.But even for more recent practitioners, Trump’s executive order on ethics, unlike President Obama’s, allows lobbyists to join the administration, even in the agencies they previously lobbied, though they are not supposed to work on specific issues on which they lobbied in the last two years. There are also restrictions on the lobbying that administration employees can do after they leave the public payroll, but there are a number of loopholes in the rules. REV DR

It’s unclear if all the beachhead employees are bound by the Trump policy. Still, even if they are, there are a number of ways that former lobbyists can flourish in the administration. For instance, Trump could waive the executive order’s requirements for certain appointees, and now doesn’t even need to make those waivers public, like Obama did. (There is a section of the White House site that says “Ethics pledge waivers will be published as they become available,” but there weren’t any waivers posted when we published.)

The placement of all these lobbyists as de facto — or actual — high-level agency staffers “raises the appearance that you could be attempting to influence public policy in favor of your former client,” said Meredith McGehee, chief of policy, programs and strategy at Issue One. “This isn’t saying that lobbyists are bad or evil, it’s simply saying the reason that you should have rules governing lobbyists in government is because they have been paid by private interests to promote the interests of their employer.”

It makes a difference whether an individual lobbied last year of 10 years ago, McGehee said. Revolving door restrictions are written with time limits, because it’s understood your relationships with clients and freshness of information cool over time.

One former for-profit college lobbyist has already resigned from his beachhead position at the Department of Education, where he worked for about a month. Taylor Hansen lobbied for Career Education Colleges and Universities until July 2016, where he focused on trying to weaken the “gainful employment” rule that puts for-profit schools’ federal funding at risk if their graduates don’t earn enough to pay back their student loans.

*ProPublica* reported that soon after Hansen started working at Education, the agency began delaying deadlines for the gainful employment rule and is reviewing the implementation of the rule. Hansen told ProPublica he didn’t work on gainful employment while at the department.

OpenSecrets Blog contacted the federal agencies with former lobbyist beachhead members about their ethics policies. The Department of Homeland Security was the only one to get back to us, and its response was vague:

“Ethics training, consistent with U.S. Office of Government Ethics regulations, is provided to all political appointees,” said DHS spokesman David Lapan in an email. “DHS ethics attorneys conduct reviews for potential conflicts of interest and provide guidance to employees.”

Nine beachhead members were registered lobbyists as recently as last year; eight of them have filed forms with the Senate deregistering from that work. General Mills has not filed paperwork that shows Erika Baum ending her lobbying gig at the food company, although she is now an executive assistant to the Secretary of Transportation, according to ProPublica‘s data and lobbying records.

OpenSecrets Blog contacted all nine firms, and confirmed at least four beachheaders had formally resigned from their lobbying jobs, as opposed to taking temporary leaves of absence. Two firms said they could not divulge personnel information, and two did not reply by publication. (The ninth was General Mills.)

Among the former cohorts on K Street:

John Barsa, who is installed at DHS, has lobbied for the Aerospace Industries Association of America, a trade group for the aerospace and defense industry. He’s also represented MRIGlobal, a research organization that touts its security and defense program and runs facilities for the Department of Energy and the Department of Defense. He deregistered in 2013, though he stayed at his lobbying firm until 2015.

Pete Giambastiani, in his role as special assistant at the office of the secretary of defense, might visit one of those facilities. He, too, has a history of lobbying on behalf of defense interests. His past clients, through 2014, include the Defense Venture Group, Finmeccanica SpA and the Navy League of the US. Giambastiani also served in the Department of the Navy and the offices of Reps. Jeff Miller (R-Fla.) and, most recently, Tom Rooney (R-Fla.).

Mark Maddox‘s clients as a lobbyist included General Synfuels International, Calcasieu Refinery Co.and Cline Resource and Development. Now, fittingly, he’s a key beachhead figure at the Energy Department. He deregistered in 2015, though he continued working at The Livingston Group/Maddox Strategies.

Then there’s Geoff Burr, who is at the Department of Labor. Until 2015, he was the top lobbyist for the Associated Builders and Contractors, which is always fighting wage standards in federal contracts and is on the other side of labor unions when it comes to exposure to hazardous materials. He then went on to run the lobbying shop at Cablevision. Burr previously put in time at Labor, from 2006 to 2008.

Other departments have smatterings of staff who have lobbied on behalf of issues that are intensely political. Julie Kirchner, a Homeland Security adviser, represented the Federation for Amer Immigration Reform, a nonprofit that seeks to reduce immigration levels. (She deregistered in 2015.) At the Department of Agriculture, special assistant George Dunlop brings with him his experience lobbying for the Tobacco Quota Warehouse Alliance, which advocated in support of tobacco producers from 1999 to 2001.

So far, the links between lobbying and the beachhead team have been pretty direct: Health care lobbyists at HHS, defense lobbyists at Homeland Security, and so on. But what about the Department of Commerce, which is tasked with the broad goal of expanding economic growth? Earl Comstock, director of the Office of Policy and Strategic Planning at Commerce, has demonstrated the flexibility befitting the nation’s multifaceted economy. In his 18 years of lobbying until 2015, he represented firms from Swiss International Air Lines to the Alaska Eskimo Whaling Commission to the Teamsters Union. He can now apply that diverse experience as he makes his way back to government — he was a staffer on the Senate Commerce, Science, & Transportation Committee from 1988-1991.

In some cases, the revolving door made a complete 360 swivel:At least 14 of the beachheads have previously worked in the same agency where Trump has now placed them.

One of them is Marcus Peacock, now adviser for Office of Management & Budget, who worked in that office for eight years under GOP Presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush (R). Peacock worked for Jellinek, Schwartz & Connolly as a program manager in the early 1990’s. Most recently he was the environment & energy consultant for dark-money nonprofit Right to Rise Policy Solutions, which supported Jeb Bush.

Here are the rest of the former lobbyists on Trump’s beachhead team:

• Patricia Adkins – Executive director at the Consumer Product Safety Commission. Lobbying client was the Home Safety Council until 2010, after which she worked at Safe Kids Worldwide. Has worked at CPSC since 2014 under Obama, and was temporarily hired to stay on under the Trump administration.
• Byron Anderson – Dept. of Labor. Lobbying clients included American General Corp and Transamerica Companies. Deregistered 2016.
• Deidre Bass – Dept. of Housing and Urban Development. Lobbying client was the Stark Area Transit Authority. Deregistered 2008.
• Scott Cameron – Dept. of Interior. Lobbying client was Chep USA. Deregistered in 2001, then worked at Interior and Grant Thornton LLP.
• Mauricio Claver-Carone – Dept. of Treasury. Lobbying client was the Cuba Democracy Public Advocacy Corp. Deregistered 2016.
• Martin Dannenfelser – Dept. of Energy. Lobbying client was the Family Research Council. Deregistered 2000, worked at the Energy Innovation Reform Project.
• Lynda Davis – Dept. of Veterans Affairs. Lobbying clinets included Florida State College at Jacksonville and Valencia Community College, as well as Lockheed Martin, Raydon Corp and BAE Systems. Most recently, was executive director of a group called the Military and Veteran Caregiver Network.
• Sheila Greenwood – Dept. of Housing and Urban Development. Lobbying clients included Prudential Financial and Wal-Mart. Deregistered 2014, continued working at Prudential Financial.
• Scott Hommel – Dept. of Interior. Lobbying clients included American Defense Systems, Avalex Technologies and the National Guard Association of the U.S. Deregistered 2010, served as now-Secretary Ryan Zinke’s chief of staff.
• Russell Laird – Dept. of Agriculture. Lobbying clients include the National Cooperative Services Corp. and the National Rural Utilities Cooperative Finance Corp. Deregistered 2016.
• Keagan Lenihan – Dept. of Health and Human Services. Lobbying client was McKesson Corp. Deregistered 2016.
• Marianne McInerney – Dept. of Transportation. Lobbying client was the American International Automobile Dealers Association, a lobbying group for foreign car dealers, where she was also president. Joined beachhead team from electric car maker Cenntro Automotive.
• Justin Mikolay – Office of the Secretary of Defense. Lobbying client was Palantir Technologies. Deregistered 2016.
• Wayne Palmer – Dept. of Labor. Lobbying clients included the Alliance for Healthcare Competitiveness and AstraZeneca Pharmaceuticals. Deregistered 2015, continued working at AstraZeneca Pharmaceuticals.
• Alex Pryor (or Campau) – Dept. of Health and Human Services. Lobbying clients included AmeriHealth Caritas, Blue Cross/Blue Shield and Fresenius Medical Care. Deregistered 2014, worked at the House Budget Committee and Senate Republican Policy Committee.
• Lora Ries – DHS. Lobbying clients included General Dynamics and Boeing. Deregistered 2010, worked with two technology companies that had contracts with DHS.
• Heidi Stirrup – Dept. of Health and Human Services. Lobbying clients included the National Association of Spine Specialists and Aurora Organic Dairy. Deregistered 2008, worked at Faithful Catholic Citizens, then the Department of Commerce followed by the House Ways and Means Subcommittee on Health.
• George Sugiyama – Environmental Protection Agency. Lobbying clients included the National Mining Association, Southern Co. and Solargenix Energy. Deregistered 2013, worked at the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.
• Cathy Tripodi – Dept. of Energy. Lobbying clients were Abound Solar and the South Coast Air Quality Management District. Deregistered 2012, worked at the North Carolina Department of Transportation.
• Laura Clay Trueman – Dept. of Health and Human Services. Lobbying clients included Aetna, Coalition for Affordable Health. Deregistered 2007, worked at the UnitedHealth Group and then the Heritage Foundation.
• Brooks Tucker – Dept. of Veterans Affairs. Lobbying clients included Management Solutions and Air Comm Corp. Deregistered 2016.
• Stephen Vaughn – U.S. Trade Rep. Lobbying client was U.S. Steel. Deregistered 2015, worked at King & Spalding LLP.
• Chad Wolf – Dept. of Homeland Security. Lobbying clients included Harris Corp. and Boeing. Deregistered 2016.
• Mark Zelden – Dept. of Labor. Lobbying clients included Birmingham Water Works and the cities of Foley, Jackson and Mobile, Alabama. Deregistered 2014, worked at Adams and Reese.

Senior researcher Dan Auble contributed to this report. 

RELATED TOPICS

• appointees
• beachhead
• Donald Trump
• lobbyists
• Trump administration

==

no lnx

How Enbridge Helped Write Minnesota Pipeline Laws, Aiding Its Line 3 Battle Today

By Logan Carroll

The Minnesota section of Enbridge's Line 3 pipeline accounts for nearly 300 miles of the longest crude oil transport system in the world, and it is failing. The multi-billion-dollar transnational corporation has applied for a permit to replace it. Opposition from tribes in the region and environmental groups is slowing the project, but the process at times appears so tilted in Enbridge's favor that, watching the court battles and utility commission meetings, it almostfeels like Enbridge wrote the rules.

At one point in its application to build the new Line 3, Enbridge listed all the federal and state laws that regulate the permitting and construction of pipelines. Nearly all the Minnesota laws originated in one 1987 Senate bill: S.F. 90.

This bill was accompanied by unprecedented pipeline industry lobbying—led in spending by Enbridge—and included subtle but major handouts to pipeline companies. One such provision imposes a sweeping limit on the public's ability to oppose new pipelines, including the Line 3 replacement project.

On May 18, 2018, about 100 people gathered at the Minnesota capitol in protest of the Line 3 project.

Industry-Friendly Language

According to environmental lawyer Paul Blackburn, one of the largest barriers to pipeline regulation is actually the federal Pipeline Safety Act, which preempts most state regulations. He called the law "a beautiful example of how to appear to regulate something without actually regulating it at all."

Still, Blackburn said there are ways for states to regulate pipelines, with some of the most powerful being zoning, permitting, and routing laws. However, S.F. 90 includes industry-friendly language that undercuts these and other potential regulations.

The bill allowed pipeline operators to classify their own data after a spill, making it inaccessible to the public. It instituted stiff civil and criminal penalties for pipeline company employees who failed to alert the authorities or destroyed evidence after a spill, but the companies were subject only to relatively small fines.

Perhaps S.F. 90's largest handout was the overhaul of Minnesota's routing and permitting process. Before 1987, counties and towns could use zoning to exert some control over the routing and permitting of pipelines (how and where they were built), but S.F. 90 preempted local zoning of pipelines, a measure with implications for the Line 3 battle today. Instead, a new pipeline would require only a single routing permit, issued by the Environmental Quality Board, an authority which shifted to the Public Utilities Commission in 2005.

This is the commission that will decide the fate of Enbridge's Line 3 replacement project, a decision expected in June.

The bill's strongest provision established the call-before-you-dig system, requiring pipeline operators to register the locations of their lines. However, the system is overseen by a nonprofit run by pipeline and excavation industry representatives, and while excavators who don't comply are fined, there is no punishment for pipeline operators who don't register their lines.

Hidden Pipelines, Hidden Influence?

In 1986, in Mounds View, Minnesota, a gasoline pipeline exploded, leveling an entire city block and killing two: a woman and her daughter. After the explosion, the governor convened a commission to study how to better regulate the industry. The commission was co-chaired by state Senator Steve Novak, who was also S.F. 90's primary sponsor.

He describes the bill as a compromise between three sides: industry, government and environmentalists. Before S.F. 90, Novak said, "You'd be living in your neighborhood, going to a school, at a park—some damn pipeline was going right underneath you and you didn't know it."

The next legislative session, while S.F. 90 was being drafted in early 1987, Enbridge Energy Partners (then Lakehead Pipe Line Company) spent more than $15,000 lobbying the Minnesota Legislature. This might seem modest post-Citizens United, but it was more than the company would spend in the state in the next 18 years combined.

The petroleum and natural gas industry spent $47,101 in the first six months of that year, nearly all of it by pipeline companies, a figure that would drop to only $17,479 in the year that followed this period. Although not required to disclose how they spent this money, typical lobbying expenses include wining and dining public officials, advertising, or preparing and distributing lobbyingmaterials.

Novak doesn't recall many specifics of how the bill was drafted, except that nothing was controversial at the time and everything was unanimous, including the preemption of local zoning. One of the problems S.F. 90 addressed was that no one—including counties and cities—was regulating pipelines at all. The routing and permitting provision wasn't meant to limit regulation, but to expand it by clearly identifying who was responsible for these decisions.

For his part, Novak doesn't recall the industry manipulating the process, though he admits the possibility. "If there were things that occurred in the seams and along the edges that, possibly, 30 years later, appear to be a manipulation, we didn't know it at the time," Novak said.

Novak's explanation echoes the conclusion of a 2014 Suffolk University study of the effectiveness of state-level lobbying: "By showing a willingness to work with a bill that an interest group opposes in its current form, the lobbyist reassures legislators who might otherwise worry about the intent of the lobbyist and the veracity of the information the lobbyist is providing." When using this approach, the study found, lobbyists were able to insert industry-friendly language into 65 percent of state legislation.

"There may be conspiracies," Novak laughed a little, "going on today that we didn't think of in those days … I would recommend you find some legislators to fix it."

Trying to Fix It

In 2013, state Rep. Frank Hornsteinintroduced a modest oil transport safety bill in response to the Lac-Mégantic, Canada, oil train disaster that killed 47 people and an oil train derailment in Minnesota that released 30,000 gallons.

The bill would have required pipeline and railroad companies to pay into a first responder safety fund and conform to some standards for responding to spills.

Early on, rail companies opposed the bill but quickly accepted many of the provisions. The pipeline industry was silent until the very end. "Out of nowhere, they almost literally parachuted into town," Hornstein said. They poured in from Washington, DC; Oklahoma; the Gulf Coast: "All these lobbyists descended on the capital and started lobbying against my bill."

Hornstein sat down with the lobbyists, who represented the American Petroleum Institute and pipeline companies, including Enbridge. He described a tense meeting which culminated in one lobbyist demanding to know his "philosophy of oil."

"I don't know," he said. "There's a lot of it and it causes climate change."

After that, things moved quickly. While Hornstein worked to get his bill through the House, industry lobbyists worked to get all references to pipelines removed from the Senate version. A small war erupted when reconciling the two versions, requiring the governor's intervention. In the end, the bill regulated only oil trains; pipeline operators would pay into the safety fund but all other references to them were removed.

New Line 3, Same Old Story

In the last several years, most of Enbridge's lobbying efforts in the state have been directed at the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission (PUC). Last year, Enbridge spent more than $5 million to influence the PUC, including lawyers' fees to argue before the commission. However, the company now spends more than $200,000 a year lobbying the legislature. Perhaps not coincidentally, the legislature passed a bill last week that would have allowed Line 3 to bypass the PUC altogether. This week, the governor vetoed that bill.

Sections of pipe destined for Enbridge's Line 3 replacement project, in Hardisty, Alberta, August 10, 2016.

Most developments in the bureaucratic war over Line 3 happen at the state capital, politically and geographically removed from those the pipeline would affect most. The wording was subtle, but if S.F. 90 hadn't preempted local zoning, those opposing Line 3 could work with local officials to erect additional barriers.

For better or worse, S.F. 90 was an historic piece of legislation. Just last summer, Novak met with others who helped craft S.F.90 to celebrate the 30th anniversary of its passage. He's proud of the bill and points out that call-before-you-dig has likely prevented another catastrophe. On the other hand, S.F. 90 continues to benefit oil and pipeline companies and limit public participation in decisions about pipelines.

"Maybe times have changed," Novak said of the law, "and it's time to revisit it."

Enbridge did not respond to requests for comment.

==

public cit

vote no on the House version of Senate Bill 2155. 

U.S. House of Representatives votes on the Bank Lobbyist Act — a major rollback of the Wall Street reforms enacted after the 2008 financial crash.

Tell your representative to vote “NO."

To overcome Congress' proclivity to deliver on the demands of their Wall Street donors, we need substantial public outrage.

Take action now to kill this bill.

If passed, the Bank Lobbyist Act would:

• Allow banks to engage in the kind of risky behavior that caused the 2008 financial crash;

• Make taxpayer-funded bailouts more likely;

• Exempt 25 of the nation’s largest banks from needed oversight;

• Drastically reduce reporting of racial discrimination in mortgage lending;

• Encourage manipulative sales tactics on certain housing, and more.
• ---

Sponsor: Sen. Crapo, Mike [R-ID] | Cosponsor statistics: 26 current - includes 19 original

co sponsor 12dems

==

Quality over quantity: Lobbying expenses continue to rise, but with fewer lobbyists

For the past five years — with the exception of a dip in 2016 — spending on lobbying in the first six months has been steadily increasing.

Overall spending for the first six months of 2017 amounts to $1.66 billion — the highest it has been since the first half of 2012, which was followed by a roughly $50 million drop in 2013.

However, while money has been pouring in, the number of lobbyists has been dwindling....read more.

by Sara S

==

activist supress:

https://www.desmogblog.com/2017/06/22/exclusive-pa-lawmaker-working-curb-pipeline-protestors-tied-shadow-lobbyists-company-behind-project

:{

recent intensification in protests againstWilliams Partners’ planned Atlantic Sunrise pipeline in Pennsylvania prompted a state senator to propose legislation aimed at limiting demonstrations.}:

Last month, Pennsylvania Republican Senator Scott Martin announced his intention to introduce legislation that would pass the costs of law enforcement responding to protests onto the demonstrators. Martin also helped introduce a different bill that would criminalize protests at natural gas facilities.

A DeSmog investigation has found, however, that Martin is intimately tied to an obscure group of lobbyists recently hired by Williams Partners.

State Legislators Against Pipeline Protestors

The Tulsa, Oklahoma-based Williams Partners plans to construct the Atlantic Sunrise pipeline through its subsidiary, Transco. The $3 billion 200-mile project, which would transport fracked gasfrom the state’s northern shales southward to the company’s interconnecting pipeline systems, received federal approval earlier this year but still requires several state permits.

Grassroots and citizen opposition to the pipeline, which has been ongoing since the project’s original proposal in 2014, has intensified in recent months. In February, activists built an encampment on the planned route near Conestoga in Lancaster county, which Scott Martin represents.

Led by the group Lancaster Against Pipelines, they signaled their willingness to engage in nonviolent direct action.

Yet in early May, a day after arranging a conference call between local first responders and North Dakota law enforcement officials who dealt with the Dakota Access pipeline protests, Senator Martin published a legislative memo detailing his plan to propose a bill penalizing protestors. The memo, which directly referenced the Dakota Access pipeline demonstrations, is aimed at “shielding taxpayers against the additional costs resulting from protests.” Martin is currently seeking cosponsors for his legislation.

Two weeks earlier, Martin was among a group of senators advancing a bill sponsored by Republican Senator Mike Regan seeking to essentially criminalize civil disobedience and other forms of demonstrations at critical infrastructure sites, including gas pipelines and facilities. According to the bill, those who “impede or inhibit” the operations of the facility will be charged with a felony, face imprisonment, and pay hefty fines.

Williams Hires Secretive Group with Ties to Sen. Martin

A recent disclosure by Transco to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) reveals that last year the company hired an entity generically called the Pennsylvania Advocacy Group LLC.

From Transco’s latest financial report to FERC, showing a payment to Pennsylvania Advocacy Group LLC

State corporate records reveal that Pennsylvania Advocacy Group LLC was created in 2014 by five lobbyists from two different firms: Alan Novak, Angela Leopold, and Dan Hayward from Novak Strategic Advisors, and David Feidt and Michael Musser from Community Networking Strategies LLC.

Novak, Leopold, Hayward, and Feidt are also long-time top Pennsylvania republican operatives. Musser runs a political action committee that supports politicians from both parties.

Although it does not have a website, state corporate records indicate that Community Networking Strategies is a subsidiary of the Harrisburg-based legal and lobbying firm McNees, Wallace & Nurick. While Community Networking Strategies is not officially registered as a lobbying firm in Pennsylvania, state disclosure records show that McNees, Wallace & Nurick is currently lobbying for several fossil fuel entities, including Gulf Oil Ltd, Industrial Energy Consumers of Pennsylvania, and Sunoco Logistics.

Scott Martin is closely tied to Community Networking Strategies. According to his state senate financial disclosures, Martin worked at Community Networking Strategies immediately before starting his tenure as legislator in January this year.

Disclosing a position of “vice president,” Martin described his professional activities in the company as “business development.” The address he provided on the disclosure matches McNees, Wallace & Nurick’s address for the firm’s Lancaster Pennsylvania branch.

From PA Senator Scott Martin’s financial disclosure, showing his work for the lobbying firm Community Networking Resources, a subsidiary of McNees, Wallace & Nurick

Martin’s LinkedIn profile states that he worked for Community Networking Strategies between January 2016 and January 2017.

Community Networking Resources Fundraises for Senator Martin

Apart for its business lobbying, Community Networking Resources also engages in political campaigning. According to Pennsylvania campaign finance records, in recent years the company has provided political support and fundraising services – including for Scott Martin.

Michael Musser, whose two hats include Community Networking Resources and Pennsylvania Advocacy Group, runs a PAC called Better Government for PA. A review of the PAC’s records show that since 2008 it has contributed over $36,000 to Martin’s PAC, Friends of Scott Martin. At the same time, Friends of Scott Martin hired Musser’s Community Networking Resources on several occasions for fundraising services when Martin served as Lancaster County Commissioner.

Lobbyist David Feidt, also of both Community Networking Resources and Pennsylvania Advocacy Group, is registered as the treasurer of Better Government for PA PAC.

By contracting with Pennsylvania Advocacy Group, Transco can potentially benefit from its deep ties to the state’s GOP. From the Novak Strategic Advisors side of the firm, Alan Novak is former chairperson of the Pennsylvania Republican Party, while Dan Hayward served as the party’s Executive Director. Angela Leopold served in the past in the Republican State Committee of Pennsylvania.

From the Community Networking Resources side, David Feidt currently serves as chairperson of the Dauphin County Republican Committee. Feidt’s twitter account continuously promotes the use of natural gas, including support for the Atlantic Sunrise pipeline.

In a conversation with DeSmog, Michael Musser confirmed that Pennsylvania Advocacy Group was formed jointly by the firms Community Networking Resources and Novak Strategic Advisors, but said his involvement in the company is minimal. He referred DeSmog to Dan Hayward from Novak Startegic Advisors. Hayward did not reply to several requests for comment. A spokesperson for Transco did not provide comment either.

Senator Martin denies his previous work for Community Networking Resources had any effect on his legislative efforts concerning pipeline protests. In an email to DeSmog, Martin responded to a series of questions:

Have you ever provided work for Transco as part of Pennsylvania Advocacy Group and/or in any other capacity?

“I have never provided work for Transco in any capacity and haven't done work for Pennsylvania Advocacy Group.”

As senator, were you ever contacted by employees of Pennsylvania Advocacy Group and/or Community Networking Resources and/or Novak Strategic Advisors in relation to Transco's gas projects?

“As Senator, I was never contacted by these groups in relation to Transco's gas projects.”

Did your ties to Community Networking Resources have any effect on your recent legislative efforts related to pipeline protesting?

“No, Community Networking Resources had no effect or involvement on my protestor legislation being worked on. I started that initiative to try to be proactive in our community having seen the aftermath and costs of the NDAPL protests. Having been heavily involved with Emergency Management as a commissioner and concerned about costs and impacts on our community is what motivated me to look at this legislation.”

Do you currently receive any compensation from Community Networking Resources and/or its parent firm, McNees, Wallace & Nurick?

“I receive no compensation from any source except for my job as State Senator.”

Can you describe your relationship with Mike Musser of Community Networking Resources? According to state campaign finance records, Musser's PAC contributed to your PAC in the past, while Community Networking Resources provided political consulting and fundraising for your PAC.

“Mike helped organize my annual fundraisers throughout my time as county commissioner. I was employed by CNR [Community Networking Resources] for a year after I left being a county commissioner, before starting with the Senate.”==

https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-watered-down-ethics-rules-let-lobbyist-help-run-agency-he-lobbied

Geoff Burr spent much of the last decade as the chief lobbyist for a powerful construction industry trade group. Burr sought to influence a host of regulations of the Department of Labor, opposing wage standards for federal construction contracts and working against an effort to limit workers’ exposure to dangerous silica dust.

In the Obama administration, someone like Burr would have been barred by ethics rules from taking a job at an agency that he had lobbied.

In the Trump administration, Burr now has a top job at the Labor Department.

Burr is the first publicly known example of a former lobbyist who was able to take a job in the government as a result of President Donald Trump’s watering down of ethics rules in place during the Obama administration.

As a candidate, Trump regularly railed against lobbyists and led crowds in chants of “Drain the swamp!” But as president, Trump last month signed an executive order that weakened significant aspects of the Obama ethics policy, including scrapping a ban on lobbyists joining agencies they had recently lobbied.

Ethics experts say Burr’s hiring is a troubling example of how the new administration has greased the revolving door.

“A lobbyist like Burr may de-register on Monday and enter the Trump Administration on Tuesday,” said Craig Holman of the watchdog group Public Citizen. “The very same agency Burr has been lobbying as a hired gun is now Burr’s to help run. This is a grave problem for the public because the agency may well represent the special interest rather than the public interest.”

It also raises questions about ambiguous language in the Trump executive order.

Instead of banning lobbyists from working at agencies they lobbied, the Trump pledge, which has to be signed by all executive appointees, imposes restrictions on what such officials can work on. Specifically it says they cannot “participate in any particular matter on which I lobbied … or participate in the specific issue area in which that particular matter falls.”

Ethics lawyers are now puzzling over what exactly that language means.

That task is made more confusing because of an apparent error in the Trump executive order: It says the phrase “particular matter” has the “same meaning as set forth in section 207 of title 28, United States Code.”

That part of the U.S. code does not exist.

There is a definition for that term in section 207 of title :{18:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:oblique;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline;background:transparent;position:relative"):}:. (The error is doubly strange because much of the Trump executive order was copied word for word from an earlier Obama order. The White House didn’t respond to a request for comment.)

While it was cited incorrectly, the phrase “particular matter” does have a clear legal meaning, which has been detailed by the Office of Government Ethics.

Another phrase in the Trump order, “specific issue area,” was also used in the Obama order but its meaning is unclear.

“It is not defined in the Trump pledge. There’s uncertainty within the government and outside the government about what that particular term means,” said Robert Walker, an ethics lawyer at Wiley Rein in Washington. “The same lack of clarity was a problem with the Obama pledge in this area."

Because the Obama pledge included a blanket ban on lobbyists joining agencies they recently lobbied, the ambiguity of the restrictions on what lobbyists could do was less urgent.

The Obama administration was criticized for issuing a handful of waivers to allow former lobbyists to join the administration, thus skirting its own lobbyist ban. Out of thousands of appointees, there were five such waivers over the course of the Obama administration. None were at the Department of Labor.

Because Trump weakened the Obama rules, he won’t have to issue waivers in such situations. But if Trump issues a waiver allowing, say, a former lobbyist to work directly on issues that he lobbied on, we may not even find out about it: The executive order removed the mechanism for public disclosure of such waivers....

==

trump

https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2017/04/fewer-lobbyists-more-money-whats-going-on/

Before President Trump was sworn in, his rhetoric and treatment of lobbyists seemed pretty harsh. He announced lobbyists would be kicked off the transition team and registered lobbyists couldn’t work in his administration, and some lobbyists deregistered to stand a chance to serve. Then things turned, and Trump was soon letting former lobbyists serve on his temporary beachhead teams, fund his transition and inauguration, and receive waivers to allow them to join the government and work on the same issues they did in the private sector.

But that doesn’t mean his initial drain-the-swamp language didn’t send a message: From January to March, the number of registered lobbyists dropped 10.3 percent compared to 2016’s first quarter, with only 9,175 official lobbyists on record. That number has been declining in recent years, but this is the biggest drop since lobbying reports started being reported quarterly.

“The transition had a policy of not communicating with registered lobbyists and the first quarter decline is likely a result of lobbyists reading the writing on the wall and assuming the hostility demonstrated in the Obama years is going to continue in the Trump administration,” said Caleb Burns, partner at Wiley Rein LLP.

But that’s not the whole story: Although the number of people trying to sweet talk government officials has declined, the amount companies spent on the practice was the largest for a first quarter since 2012, at $838.4 million.

“For the first time in the past five years, there is a lot of energy in Washington in terms of getting legislation passed,” Burns said. “Lobbying up until this quarter has been defensive, oftentimes to ensure that nothing did happen. Those registered were not working at 100 percent, but now given the general atmosphere they’re working furiously on behalf of their clients. I’ve never seen the business community this excited in the two decades I’ve been in Washington.”

The pharmaceutical and health products industry spent the most at $78 million, about $10 million more than it did during the same period in 2016 for a 14 percent increase. (PhRMA did have the biggest spending spike of the top 10 spenders.) Oil and gas interests also pumped up their spending compared to last year, pouring in $36.1 million compared to $32.4 million in 2016, or 11 percent more.

Tech saw some record-breaking numbers from big names in the industry: Facebook spent $3.2 million this quarter, more than any previous quarter since the year social media platform first registered in 2009. (For context, it spent $2.78 million during last year’s first quarter.) It reported lobbying on cybersecurity and terrorism, high-tech worker visas and free trade agreements. Apple also spent the most it has in a quarter at $1.4 million, on self-driving cars, “issues related to mobile devices and health” and government requests for data. Google (or Alphabet) spent a few hundred thousand less than last year, but still topped other tech firms at $3.5 million, lobbying on online ads, “policies on online controversial content” (fake news?) and “travel from countries of concern.”

Among the top 100 spenders, a handful stood out for some huge jumps in spending compared to last year. Chevron, for instance, upped the ante by 77 percent, spending $3.3 million compared to $1.9 million last year, disapproving of environmental rules introduced by the previous administration. (As well as “understanding requirements” for Trump’s “Buy American Hire American” order.) Teva Pharmaceutical Industries increased its spending by 115 percent, from $1.2 million to $2.7 million in 2016. It lobbied on Medicaid rebates and the proposed board adjustment tax.

And the National Rifle Association broke into seven digit spending in a single quarter for the first time, spending $2.2 million, compared to $735,000 in 2016. Not surprisingly, the NRA focused on measures having to do with guns and hunting, including some unusual ones, such as a bill to “allow the importation of polar bear parts taken legally in sports hunts in Canada.”

As for those who cut back, Duke Energy decreased spending by 43 percent compared to last year’s first quarter, spending $1.4 million. (That’s what the energy company spent the last three quarters as well, however, with last January through March being a high spending period with $2.5 million.) Pharmaceutical company Merck saw a 47 percent drop, to $1.7 million from $3.3 million last year. And spending by the National Association of Broadcasters declined by 21 percent, to $3.8 million compared with $4.7 million in the first three months of 2016.

As for the firms getting paid, Akin Gump stayed on top with $9.2 million in earnings, which was actually a 4.5 percent drop from last year’s first quarter. In fact, of the top ten earners, half brought in less money than the same time last year: Brownstein, Podesta Group, Capitol Counsel and Van Scoyoc Associates. Covington & Burling had the biggest increase, at 32 percent, and Squire Patton Boggs had a jump of 25 percent.

--

https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2017/03/crp-unveils-foreign-lobby-watch/

https://www.opensecrets.org/fara

==

Count former House SpeakerJohn Boehner as the latest not-quite-a-lobbyist.

For nearly a decade, the number of registered lobbyists has slipped each year. This summer, the figure finally dipped below 10,000 — the lowest it’s been since the Center for Responsive Politics began keeping track in 1998. And that drop in lobbyists has been accompanied by a dropoff in revenue, painting a numerical picture of an industry seemingly in pronounced decline.

But the numbers ignore the hearty portion of Washington’s influence industry engaged in what’s sometimes referred to as “shadow lobbying,” unreported to the agencies that gather quarterly filings from those trying to bend federal policy in their clients’ favor.

That’s where, from all appearances, Boehner — who’s barred from having lobbying contacts with his former colleagues until he’s been out of office a year — could be a great fit.

Lobbying giant Squire Patton Boggs, currently the sixth highest-earning lobbying firmin the nation with over $9 million in billings in the first half of this year, announced this week that Boehner will be joining the firm as a strategic adviser on global business development in the public sector. After representing Ohio for almost a quarter century, the last four of those as speaker, Boehner resigned from the House last October after struggling to resolve conflicts between conservative and centrist elements of his Republican party.

From riches to…less obvious riches

Lobbying was very much a growth industry in the early years of the millennium — revenue doubled from 1998 to 2007, and the number of registered lobbyists grew more than 40 percent. But 2008 brought a reversal that has only continued: The most recent count puts the number at just over 9,700, compared to the 2007 peak of more than 14,800. Revenue topped out at $3.5 billion in 2010, while the 2015 figure was $3.2 million. The trend line for 2016 points to another modest decrease by year’s end.

What happened?

The recession and its aftermath are typically blamed, bringing tighter wallets all around. Another factor often mentioned is worsened congressional gridlock — if bills are less likely to be passed, organizations may not invest in trying to make that happen.

But many experts insist there’s not less lobbying going on. It’s just that much of it is unreported.

Increased regulation is one reason. In 2007 — the year the number of registered lobbyists peaked — Congress passed the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act, which required lobbyists to disclose far more information about their work and included measures to slow the “revolving door” between government and the influence industry.

The legal definition of “lobbyist” remained the same: An individual must register if more than 20 percent of his/her working time is spent advocating to government officials; other guidelines exist around income and contacts with executive and legislative branch personnel. But with a new disclosure regime, and new sanctions for violators, some lobbyists began claiming their work did not meet the threshhold and unregistered.

Until HLOGA passed, “there was no downside to being a registered lobbyist — the best practice was to err on the side of over-registration,” said Caleb Burns, a partner specializing in lobbying law at the Washington law firm Wiley Rein. “Being a lobbyist now has serious potential legal consequences.”

President Barack Obama clamped down further. In his first full day in office, Obama signed two executive orders and three presidential directives curbing the work that former lobbyists could do in his administration — including on federal advisory boards and commissions, areas previously open to those in the influence game.

The orders “had a chilling effect” on the industry, said Paul Miller, president of the National Institute for Lobbying and Ethics. “It caused people to think, ‘I’ve got to find a way around this.'”

Thus the proliferation of the shadow lobbyist. People who have unregistered in each year since 2007 include those whose jobs have changed, or those who might not have needed to register in the first place but were playing it safe. But they also include those who do their fair share of lobbying work, but classify it as something different.

A 2013 study by OpenSecrets.org found that more than 46 percent of lobbyists who were registered in 2011 but not 2012 were still with the same employer, suggesting that they were continuing to contribute to lobbying efforts while avoiding the reporting limits. Industry leaders suspect this has become increasingly common in recent years.

And some, including former lawmakers, don’t have to unregister, since they never registered to begin with.

“There’s a very easy way to define yourself as a strategic adviser or someone else who, quote, ‘doesn’t lobby’… and get away with this,” said James Thurber, founder and former director of the Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies at American University. He cited what is frequently referred to as the Daschle loophole, named for former South Dakota Sen. Tom Daschle (D), who lost his re-election bid in 2004 and pushed through the revolving door to become a “senior policy adviser” at the law and lobbying giant Alston & Bird. After holding similar titles at several other firms and doing work that looked and sounded much like lobbying over more than a decade, Daschle recently registered as a lobbyist for the first time.

Then there are those who aren’t simply traditional “walk the halls” lobbyists who deliberately maneuver around reporting thresholds, but also people taking advantage of the ways in which technology has opened up the influence industry, Miller noted. Advocating for legislation via electronic communications, think tank support, social media and survey research often overlaps signficantly with old-school lobbying — and much, if not most, of that goes unreported.

“There are too many people doing this job and not registering,” Miller said.

Using a broad definition of shadow lobbying that includes the above activities, “there can be maybe twice or three times” the industry-reported 2015 revenue of $3.2 billion, Thurber said.

Boehner won’t be the only former lawmaker at Squire Patton Boggs, whoseextensive client list includes firms ranging from Airbus and Amazon to Wake Forest University and Walton Enterprises: Former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) and former Sen. John Breaux (D-La.) have been there since 2005 and 2010, respectively; they are both registered lobbyists. Boehner’s former top advisors David Schnittger and Natasha Hammond are there, as well, as “senior policy advisers.”

Boehner’s new employment was announced just days after tobacco giant Reynolds American announced he’d be joining its board.

Patton Boggs, which was among the top three earners in the industry every year from 1998 until its 2014 merger with Squire Sanders, has long been a K Street revolving door hub, boasting a big concentration of former occupants of congressional office buildings. And it’s no surprise to see that firm or others snatch up newly available former lawmakers, who can command the highest billing rates when clients ask for their help. Of the 75 House members and senators who left the Hill at the end of the 113th Congress, at least 48.8 percent went to work for lobbying firms.

What’s ahead

Many are trying to anticipate how the next president will interact with the industry — particularly whether or not she/he will keep Obama’s restrictions, and how much their repeal might actually matter. Obama has issued waivers to allow certain former lobbyists to take positions, so it’s not as though the revolving door was slammed shut.

A new president trying to staff an administration from a limited pool of qualified individuals might not want to deal with the restrictions, which have unquestionably complicated the process. The head of the nonprofit helping the presidential transition process has urged Obama to rescind the provisions himself to remove the burden from his successor.

Donald Trump‘s views on the issue remain muddy, although some of his campaign staffers, like Paul Manafort, his campaign chairman, certainly have worked in the influence industry. But there has been “a decent amount of speculation” in the lobbying world that a Clinton presidency would bring a repeal, Burns said. Clinton, after all, is staffed by people with strong connections to the industry — such as her campaign chair, John Podesta, who helped found one of Washington’s top lobbying firms. His brother, Tony, still is chairman of the Podesta Group and has bundled funds for Clinton.

Still, even if the next administration proves kinder to lobbyists, it’s not necessarily likely that many will come out of the shadows, said Wright Andrews, a lawyer-lobbyist of nearly four decades who is best known for representing the subprime mortgage industry in the early 2000s.

“That’s the way the game is played, unfortunately,” Andrews said.

http://www.opensecrets.org/news/2016/09/boehner-joins-the-not-quite-a-lobbyist-ranks/

==

==

mta

over 10,000 registered federal lobbyists? That’s the equivalent of 20 lobbyists per elected member of Congress.

Consider just a handful of many headlines that have appeared recently on the topic:

• A Lobbyist Wrote the Bill. Will the Tobacco Industry Win Its E-Cigarette Fight? New York Times-Sep 2, 2016
• Lobbyists Fete Washington Lawmakers At Fundraisers. KUOW News and Information-Sep 1, 2016
• Lobbyist: State Could Be Sued Over Open Records Legislation. AP—Sep 1, 2016
• In Battle Over Liquor Prices, Lobbyist Wants Two Retailers Shut Down. Hartford Courant-Aug 31, 2016
• Emails Show Lobbyist's Close Ties to New York City Hall. Wall Street Journal - ‎Aug 30, 2016‎
• Audit Finds Senate Slush Fund For Lobbyist-financed Meals. STLtoday.com-Aug 29, 2016

==

listen liberal ref below

Frank points out that the Democrats have done little to advance traditional liberal goals: expanding opportunity, fighting for social justice, and ensuring that workers get a fair deal. Indeed, they have scarcely dented the free-market consensus at all. This is not for lack of opportunity: Democrats have occupied the White House for sixteen of the last twenty-four years, and yet the decline of the middle class has only accelerated. Wall Street gets its bailouts, wages keep falling, and the free-trade deals keep coming.

With his trademark sardonic wit and lacerating logic, Frank lays bare the essence of the Democratic Party's philosophy and how it has changed over the years. A form of corporate and cultural elitism has largely eclipsed the party's old working-class commitment, he finds. For certain favored groups, this has meant prosperity. But for the nation as a whole, it is a one-way ticket into the abyss of inequality. In this critical election year, Frank recalls the Democrats to their historic goals-the only way to reverse the ever-deepening rift between the rich and the poor in America

==

http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/power-lobbyists-washington

Although it’s difficult to remember those days eight years ago when Democrats seemed to represent something idealistic and hopeful and brave, let’s take a moment and try to recall the stand Barack Obama once took against lobbyists. Those were the days when the nation was learning that George W. Bush’s Washington was, essentially, just a big playground for those lobbyists and that every government operation had been opened to the power of money. Righteous disgust filled the air. “Special interests” were much denounced. And a certain inspiring senator from Illinois promised that, should he be elected president, his administration would contain no lobbyists at all. The revolving door between government and K Street, he assured us, would turn no more.

Instead, the nation got a lesson in all the other ways that “special interests” can get what they want—like simple class solidarity between the Ivy Leaguers who advise the president and the Ivy Leaguers who sell derivative securities to unsuspecting foreigners. As that inspiring young president filled his administration with Wall Street personnel, we learned that the revolving door still works, even if the people passing through it aren’t registered lobbyists.

But whatever became of lobbying itself, which once seemed to exemplify everything wrong with Washington, D.C.? Perhaps it won’t surprise you to learn that lobbying remains one of the nation’s persistently prosperous industries, and that, since 2011, it has been the focus of Influence, one of the daily email newsletters published by Politico, that great chronicler of the Obama years. Influence was to be, as its very first edition declared, “the must-read crib sheet for Washington’s influence class,” with news of developments on K Street done up in tones of sycophantic smugness. For my money, it is one of the quintessential journalistic artifacts of our time: the constantly unfolding tale of power-for-hire, told always with a discreet sympathy for the man on top.

Capitalizing on Influence

It is true that Americans are more cynical about Washington than ever. To gripe that “the system is rigged” is to utter the catchphrase of the year. But to read Influence every afternoon is to understand how little difference such attitudes make here in the nation’s capital. With each installment, the reader encounters a cast of contented and well-groomed knowledge workers, the sort of people for whom there are never enough suburban mansions or craft cocktails. One imagines them living together in a happy community of favors-for-hire where everyone knows everyone else, the restaurant greeters smile, the senators lie down with the contractors, and the sun shines brilliantly every day. This community’s labors in the influence trade have made the economy of the Washington metro area the envy of the world.

The newsletter describes every squeaking turn of the revolving door with a certain admiration. Influence is where you can read about all the smart former assistants to prominent members of Congress and the new K Street jobs they’ve landed. There are short but meaningful hiring notices—like the recent one announcing that the blue-ribbon lobby firm K&L Gates has snagged its fourth former congressional “member.” There are accounts of prizes that lobbyists give to one another and of rooftop parties for clients and ritual roll calls of Ivy League degrees to be acknowledged and respected. And wherever you look at Influence, it seems like people associated with this or that Podesta can be found registering new clients, holding fundraisers, and “bundling” cash for Hillary Clinton.

As with other entries in the Politico family of tip-sheets, Influence is itself sponsored from time to time—for one exciting week this month, by the Federation of American Hospitals (FAH), which announced to the newsletter’s readers that, for the last 50 years, the FAH “has had a seat at the table.” Appropriately enough for a publication whose beat is venality, Influence also took care to report on the FAH’s 50th anniversary party, thrown in an important room in the Capitol building, and carefully listed the many similarly important people who attended: the important lobbyists, the important members of Congress, and Nancy-Ann DeParle, the Obama administration’s important former healthcare czar and one of this city’s all-time revolving-door champions.

Describing parties like this is a standard theme in Influence, since the influence trade is by nature a happy one, a flattering one, a business eager to serve you up a bracing Negroni and encourage you to gorge yourself on fancy hors d’oeuvres. And so the newsletter tells us about the city’s many sponsored revelries—who gives them, who attends them, the establishment where the transaction takes place, and whose legislative agenda is advanced by the resulting exchange of booze and bonhomie.

The regular reader of Influence knows, for example, about the big reception scheduled to be hosted by Squire Patton Boggs, one of the most storied names in the influence-for-hire trade, at a certain office in Cleveland during the Republican Convention... about how current and former personnel of the Department of Homeland Security recently enjoyed a gathering thrown for them by a prestigious law firm... about a group called “PAC Pals” and the long list of staffers and lobbying types who attended their recent revelry... about how theDemocratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz and the gang got together at a much-talked-about bar to sip artisanal cocktails.

There’s a poignant note to the story of former Congressional representative Melissa Bean—once the toast of New Democrats everywhere, now the “Midwest chair of JPMorgan”—who recently returned to D.C. to get together with her old staff. They had also moved on to boldface jobs in lobbying, television, and elsewhere. And there’s a note of the fabulous to the story of the Democratic member who has announced plans to throw a fundraiser at a Beyoncé concert. (“A pair of tickets go for $3,500 for PACs,” Influence notes.)

Bittersweet is the flavor of the recent story about the closing of Johnny’s Half Shell, a Capitol Hill restaurant renowned for the countless fundraisers it has hosted over the years. On hearing the news of the restaurant’s imminent demise, Influence gave over its pixels to tales from Johnny’s glory days. One reader fondly recounted a tale in which Occupy protesters supposedly interrupted a Johnny’s fundraiser being enjoyed by Senator Lindsey Graham and a bunch of defense contractors. In classic D.C.-style, the story was meant to underscore the stouthearted stoicism of the men of power who reportedly did not flinch at the menacing antics of the lowly ones.

A Blissful Community of Money

Influence is typically written in an abbreviated, matter-of-fact style, but its brief items speak volumes about the realities of American politics. There is, for example, little here about the high-profile battle over how transgender Americans are to be granted access to public restrooms. However, the adventures of dark money in our capital are breathlessly recounted, as the eternal drama of plutocracy plays itself out and mysterious moneymen try to pass their desires off as bona fide democratic demands.

“A group claiming to lobby on behalf of ordinary citizens against large insurance companies is in fact orchestrated by the hospital industry itself,” begins a typical item. The regular reader also knows about the many hundreds of thousands of dollars spent by unknown parties to stop Puerto Rican debt relief and about the mysterious group that has blown vast sums to assail the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) but whose protesters, when questioned outside a CFPB hearing, reportedly admitted that they were “day laborers paid to be there.”

You will have noticed, reader, the curiously bipartisan nature of the items mentioned here. But it really shouldn’t surprise you. After all, for this part of Washington, the only real ideology around is based on money—how much and how quickly you get paid.

Money is divine in this industry, and perhaps that is why Influence is fascinated with libertarianism, a fringe free-market faith which (thanks to its popularity among America’s hard-working billionaires) is massively over-represented in Washington. Readers of Influence know about the Competitive Enterprise Institute and its “Night in Casablanca” party, about the R Street Institute’s “Alice in Wonderland” party, about how former Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli came to sign up with FreedomWorks, and how certain libertarians have flown from their former perches in the vast, subsidized free-market coop to the fashionable new Niskanen Center.

There are also plenty of small-bore lobbying embarrassments to report on, as when a currently serving congressional representative sent a mean note to a former senator who is now an official at the American Motorcyclist Association. Or that time two expert witnesses gave “nearly identical written statements” when testifying on Capitol Hill. Oops!

But what most impresses the regular reader of Influence is the brazenness of it all. To say that the people described here appear to feel no shame in the contracting-out of the democratic process is to miss the point. Their doings are a matter of pride, with all the important names gathering at some overpriced eatery to toast one another and get their picture taken and advance some initiative that will always, of course, turn out to be good for money and terrible for everyone else.

This is not an industry, Influence’s upbeat and name-dropping style suggests. It is a community—a community of corruption, perhaps, but a community nevertheless: happy, prosperous, and joyously oblivious to the plight of the country once known as the land of the middle class.

Thomas Frank is the author of the just-published Pity the Billionaire: The Hard-Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right (Metropolitan Books). He has also writtenThe Wrecking Crew, What’s the Matter With Kansas?, and several other abrasive volumes. He is the “Easy Chair” columnist for Harper’s Magazine and the founding editor of The Baffler.

K st Sac

lobbyist directory

http://www.californiaiga.org/directory.html

Ari Rabin-Havt and Media Matters have come together to chronicle how things got this bad in a new book, Lies, Incorporated: The World of Post-Truth Politics.

http://www.amazon.com/Lies-Incorporated-World-Post-Truth-Politics/dp/0307279596

anchor

Berman: tie is a win b/c status quo

Drutman New Am fdn 12.7x lobby vs pac 2008-12?

hist lobby

Hull 1st surrender 1812

Colt 1850's extend 7 yrs his patent, gave out gun one to 12 yo note 18

Lies, Incorporated: The World of Post-Truth P… (Paperback)

by Ari Rabin-Havt, Media Matters for America

==

http://www.publicintegrity.org/2016/02/11/19279/amid-federal-gridlock-lobbying-rises-states

The biosimilar campaign is just one example of the wide-reaching power of state-level lobbying — a power that’s grown as Congress stalemates and federal lobbying declines.

More companies and interest groups are pushing their agendas in the states, according to a Center for Public Integrity analysis of five years of lobbyist registrations from all 50 states gathered by the National Institute on Money in State Politics. Since 2010, the number of entities with either in-house lobbyists or part-time hired guns working in the states has grown more than 10 percent.

That means, on average, every state lawmaker was outnumbered by six companies, trade associations, unions or other groups angling for their attention from 2010 to 2014.

==

https://www.americanprogress.org/press/release/2015/04/15/111169/release-cap-analysis-shows-anti-environmental-priorities-dominate-first-100-days-of-new-congress-but-no-results-to-show/

april 2015

D.C. — According to a Center for American Progress analysis of roll call votes, the 114th Congress has cast more roll call votes on energy and environmental issues in its first 100 days than on any other legislative issue, with none of the energy and environmental proposals voted on becoming law.

Thirty percent of the votes cast in the 114th Congress were on energy- and environment-related topics, more than any other legislative area. The Senate alone cast more than 44 percent of its votes on fossil-fuel and anti-environmental priorities, including approving the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, blocking action to address climate change, and selling America’s public lands.

“With close to three-quarters of a billion dollars from coal, oil, and gas companies behind them, the new Congress spent its first 100 days pushing divisive and unpopular proposals that have gone nowhere,” said Matt Lee-Ashley, Senior Fellow and the Director of Public Lands at CAP. “Congressional leaders must now choose whether to drive their anti-environment agenda deeper into a ditch or whether to align their priorities with American families who want more renewable energy and better protections for public lands, public health, and clean drinking water.”

CAP’s analysis found that on 74 percent of the energy and environmental votes, a majority of senators supported the anti-environment position. Public opinion research commissioned by CAP shows that the majority of Americans widely oppose many of the proposals that Senate leaders have chosen to prioritize, including efforts to remove key protections for land, water, and wildlife and to block the creation of new national parks.

An earlier CAP analysis found that fossil-fuel interests spent more than $721 million to help elect and influence the agenda of the 114th Congress.

Click here to read the column.​

For more information on this topic or to speak with an expert, contact Tom Caiazza at tcaiazza@americanprogress.org or 202.481.7141.

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2007 washingtonian

After a lucrative 12-year run on Capitol Hill, it hasn’t been the best of times for Washington lobbyists, especially Republicans.

One of the most prominent lobbyists, Jack Abramoff, now resides in Cumberland, Maryland, a guest of the Federal Bureau of Prisons. His prosecution on charges of giving illegal gifts and meals to lawmakers and defrauding clients cast a pall over a profession that, fairly or not, didn’t have the best reputation to begin with.

For Republicans who thought things couldn’t get worse, they did. Democrats won both houses of Congress in the 2006 elections, returning some old bulls—among them Barney Frank, Charles Rangel, John Conyers, John Dingell, and Henry Waxman—to power.

Twelve years earlier, new Republican majority leader Tom DeLay instituted the K Street Project, by which loyal friends of the 1994 Republican revolution were to be rewarded. Big business was none too subtly informed that friends and aides of the victors should reap the spoils.

Democratic powers like Thomas Hale Boggs Jr. began talking about retirement. Republican staffers and even members of Congress, eager to cash in, left the Hill and began recruiting clients who could benefit from their contacts and influence.

Abramoff was just one lobbyist who became a hot property. In 1998, when we last picked Washington’s 50 top lobbyists, Abramoff ranked 22nd. Shortly thereafter he was wooed away from one firm by another, whose revenues skyrocketed—and whose partners apparently didn’t look closely at how he operated.

The amount of money generated by people claiming to have influence that can affect legislation, appropriations, and agency decisions is big. Laws now require lobbyists to file financial-disclosure forms when they make contact with a legislator. Those forms reveal the minimum that lobbyists can make. Much more money still legally goes unreported—for organizing grassroots lobbying campaigns, advising clients on how they can lobby, making speeches, contacting regulatory agencies, and creating public-relations campaigns.

A major group of clients is public universities, hospitals, and municipalities, which spend hundreds of millions of dollars each year to win appropriations, often in the form of earmarks—language designating that funds go to a specific project or institution—that their elected representatives don’t have the time or power to get.

“Congressional staffs are extremely busy, and often there aren’t enough staffers to do everything,” says a lobbyist who specializes in representing cities. “Our job is to facilitate communication, package priorities, and make sure that requests for funding meet deadlines and get included in legislation.”

This has created an odd situation on Capitol Hill. Members of the House of Representatives make $165,200 a year. Former congressmen like Bill Paxon of New York and Bob Livingston of Louisiana make that much representing a single university, hospital, or water district. Livingston’s lobby group took in $16 million last year, much of it from government institutions in Louisiana that he formerly represented.

Two of the biggest lobby firms in Washington, Cassidy & Associates and Van Scoyoc Associates, specialize in earmarks.

“Public institutions are starved for facilities,” says Stewart Van Scoyoc, who counts dozens of colleges among his clients. “They can’t go to their states because the legislatures claim they have no money, so they come to us.”

Depending on the size of the project and the target funding, lobbying fees can range from $700,000 to $1,000,000 a year, on the high side. There are no guarantees—lobbyists are not allowed to work on contingency. If the project is not included in an appropriations bill, there is nothing to do but try, try again the next year, perhaps with a more influential lobbyist.

Earmarks are profitable, but many lobbyists look down their noses at that practice area. Says tax lobbyist John Raffaelli, “We don’t play in that world. Our firm is more involved in creating strategies for policies that my clients are advocating.”

Crudely distilled into three words, practitioners say, the lobbying game boils down to “finding, grinding, and minding.”

You find a client with a need, and then you have to go into the system and find a way to get what the client wants done. That’s the grinding. The minding is making sure that your language or your earmark stays in the bill until it is signed by the President and isn’t axed, thanks to a rival lobbyist, at the last minute. The minding, lobbyists say, continues even after your legislation is passed.

In 2006 a mysterious last-minute provision that had the effect of prohibiting online poker made its way into a port-security bill. Martin Gold, the lobbyist responsible for making it happen, is with Covington & Burling, which represents the National Football League. The NFL was not really interested in poker, but many online gambling sites also allow betting on football games. The NFL wants to stamp out gambling on its games. It doesn’t like that online gambling sites make money off its product without paying the NFL for the privilege. Online poker got caught in the crossfire when Gold’s provision made it much more difficult to transfer cash from American banks to online casinos.

After the new Congress took power in 2007, House Finance Committee chair Barney Frank announced that he would revisit the ban on Internet gaming and hoped to rescind the measure the NFL paid for. That, lobbyists say, is where the minding comes in. Even after a bill is passed and signed, it is subject to reversal. The good lobbyist can’t let his or her guard down.

In the wake of the Abramoff scandal, questions were raised, as they periodically are, about the need for a layer of lobbyists between corporate America or municipal America and the United States Congress. Lobbyists, almost to a person, write Abramoff off as the bad apple in the barrel rather than acknowledging that the barrel itself might be the problem. A few lobby firms have appointed ethics officers; most say they aren’t needed. But even good ones sometimes work in the shadows. As one prominent lobbyist observes, “My greatest success every year is getting something done without having my fingerprints on it.”

On the surface, the lobbying industry seems to be highly competitive. Legal Times recently listed 50 firms with revenues of more than $7 million a year. The highest-grossing of the 50, the law firm Akin Gump, reported $76 million in lobbying fees last year.

Law firms, owned by their partners, are quite competitive. But in recent years private lobby shops, operating outside the strictures of bar-association codes, have proliferated. A little secret of Washington lobbying is that three large international advertising companies own most of the powerful lobby companies. They are Omnicom, based in New York, and two London corporations, WPP and Interpublic Group.

Vin Weber, a former Minnesota congressman now perceived as one of the most influential Republican lobbyists, works for a relatively obscure consulting firm called Clark & Weinstock. But Clark & Weinstock is owned by Omnicom. Omnicom also owns Ketchum, a large PR firm, which owns the Washington Group, whose CEO is former congresswoman Susan Molinari. Omnicom also owns the giant PR firm Fleishman-Hillard as well as the Washington lobby company Porter Novelli.

British-based WPP owns three giant PR companies—Ogilvy, Burson-Marsteller, and Hill & Knowlton. Within that framework, the British now own such powerful lobby firms as Quinn Gillespie & Associates, Timmons & Company, and Wexler & Walker. Interpublic is the owner of one of Washington’s biggest lobby shops, Cassidy & Associates.

Wayne Berman, whose homegrown Federalist Group turned into Ogilvy Government Relations, owned by WPP, is typical in claiming that the foreign ownership is no problem: “It gives us a larger canvas and offices all over the world.”

I asked another lobbyist how people would feel if a Chinese company rather than a British one owned five of the most influential lobbying firms in America with many former members of Congress on the payroll.

“I never thought of it that way,” he replied. “I guess that might be a problem.”

The most successful lobbyists do more than represent their clients’ interests. They also raise money from clients for the politicians whose favors they seek. And some of their millions of dollars in fees goes to the wining and dining of legislators, though much of the ostensible graft has been taken out of the system with restrictions on free meals, game tickets, and the like.

With Republican rule at an end for now and Democrats back on top in Congress, there naturally are changes in who’s on top in the lobby world. But Republicans are not completely out of luck. The 51–49 makeup of the Senate is tenuous. As one GOP-oriented lobbyist says, “We are down but not out. The Democrats can’t get anything done in the Senate without us.”

After culling the lobby disclosure reports and checking on who has gotten things done, who is likely to get things done in the next few years, and who has the best connections and influence, we present Washington’s 50 top lobbyists.

1.Thomas Hale Boggs, Patton Boggs. His father was Democratic House majority leader. His mother succeeded her husband in Congress after his death in a plane crash. His sister is a leading Washington journalist. Another sister was a New Jersey mayor. But this son of Washington power, never elected to political office, surpasses them all in influence.

It was thought, after Republicans took power in the 1990s, that Boggs’s influence would wane. He talked about retiring to his Eastern Shore farm, where he liked to take House committee chairmen on weekend hunting trips. Now, with close friends like John Dingell, Henry Waxman, and Barney Frank back on top, Boggs’s law firm, Patton Boggs, makes $70 million a year from more than 350 lobbying clients.

His biggest and best-known client, Mars, pays him $2 million a year. In return Boggs has for years made sure that every US serviceman and woman gets a Snickers bar or pack of M&Ms in his or her rations almost every day.

2.Robert Dole, Alston & Bird. The onetime presidential candidate and Republican Senate majority leader let it be known after leaving office that he was willing to promote anything from Viagra to Visa to Dunkin’ Donuts. Sure enough, of all the US senators turned lobbyists, Bob Dole is at the top.

When many people expressed outrage that the management of our vital seaports was being outsourced to an Arab-owned company, Dubai Ports World, Dole signed on to build public support for the takeover. Dole’s fee from Dubai was $320,000 in 2006. The Wall Street Journal reported in April that Dole had accepted a $560,000 fee to help a controversial Russian billionaire under suspicion in Russia for bribery obtain a visa to the United States. Dole, who says he doesn’t lobby his wife or other members of the Senate, persuaded the State Department to grant the visa.

At 83, Dole is described by colleagues as an unreconstructed workaholic who has never been happier—and certainly not more prosperous.

3.Tony Podesta, Podesta Group. A Chicago native who came to Washington in 1970 to work for Common Cause, Tony Podesta has a practice that’s changed in recent years. Once associated with high-tech and media clients, he recently was hired by British Petroleum, whose pipeline problems and refinery fires have created regulatory and public-relations issues. Podesta has quietly been guiding BP through congressional hearings.

He also represents Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics, trying to sell Congress and the Pentagon on another version of their Stryker troop-transport vehicle. During the Clinton administration, it didn’t hurt that brother John was White House chief of staff.

When Republicans came to power, the former Ted Kennedy aide deftly partnered with Republican strategist Dan Mattoon, a pal of then-Speaker Dennis Hastert’s. Mattoon hired Hastert’s son to work with him. With Nancy Pelosi now Speaker, Mattoon, the younger Hastert, and Podesta split up earlier this year. Podesta and his team of 23 lobbyists are said to collect $12 million to $15 million in annual billings.

4.Jack Quinn, Quinn Gillespie & Associates. A former White House counsel to President Clinton and confidant of Al Gore’s, Jack Quinn has jumped to the top of the heap of former Democratic bigwigs. His firm lists revenues of some $18 million a year and is growing at 15 percent a year. His client fees include $560,000 annually from the Alliance for Quality Nursing Home Care, and he pulls in millions more from public accountants, drug companies, banks, and telecommunications companies.

Quinn and his partner, Republican strategist Ed Gillespie, sold ownership of their business several years ago to London-based WPP. The sale no doubt netted Quinn millions. His greatest lobbying coup remains his most notorious—winning a presidential pardon for international financing fugitive Marc Rich as President Clinton was leaving the White House.

5.Vin Weber, Clark & Weinstock. The past 12 years have been good ones for Minnesota ex-congressman Vin Weber, once a neighbor of Newt Gingrich’s in Arlington. Rather than join the Gingrich revolution, Weber decided to take advantage of it. He became the Washington face of a once-obscure New York law firm and built it into a ten-person, $9-million lobbying practice.

Weber has received more than $2 million in recent years from BNP Paribas, a French bank involved in the controversial United Nations oil-for-food program under which Saddam Hussein is said to have pocketed some $10 billion. Weber steered bank executives through a gauntlet of congressional hearings and explanations to the White House and State Department, and BNP Paribas emerged from the scandal unscathed.

6.Linda Daschle, Baker Donelson, Bearman, Caldwell & Berkowitz. A lifelong airplane enthusiast who began working for the Federal Aviation Administration in her twenties, Daschle now brings in more than $1 million a year from clients such as American Airlines, Boeing, and Lockheed Martin.

When her husband, former Democratic Senate majority leader Tom Daschle, was in power, eyebrows often were raised about Linda Daschle’s success. But with her husband no longer in office, she has been more successful than ever, in part because she has dropped her self-imposed curb on lobbying the Senate. She has expanded her lobbying niche from air to rails, working for Norfolk Southern on rail-security legislation. She’s also working hard on behalf of American Airlines on FAA reauthorization—legislation that will set goals and priorities for air travel into the next decade.

7.Joel Jankowsky, Akin Gump. Washington’s most profitable lobbying group in 2006 is headed by this soft-spoken Oklahoman who is said never to have sent a press release touting his accomplishments. Jankowsky created the Akin Gump lobby practice more than 20 years ago for firm patriarch Robert Strauss, who at age 89 still comes into the office regularly but is not registered as a lobbyist. With a team of 45 and revenues over $76 million last year, according to Legal Times, Akin Gump’s lobby practice is one of the biggest in Washington.

One of Jankowsky’s most profitable endeavors, though ultimately unsuccessful, was attempting to deflate congressional opposition to China’s National Offshore Oil Company’s attempt to buy California-based Unocal. Stockholders’ eventual acceptance of a rival bid from Chevron had to have left the Chinese wondering if Jankowsky’s $2.2-million fee was worth it.

8.Edward Gillespie, Quinn Gillespie & Associates. The Democrats may have won Congress, but the White House is still in Republican hands, and this former RNC chair has turned his relationship with President Bush into an $18-million business. A onetime aide to Republican House majority leader Richard Armey, Gillespie helped draft the “Contract With America” that accompanied the GOP victory in 1994.

When the White House needed help pushing the Supreme Court nominations of John Roberts and Samuel Alito through Congress, Gillespie was happy to step in with free advice. Gillespie partners with Democratic powerhouse Jack Quinn to make sure all bases are covered. His blue-chip client list includes AT&T, Sony, and big drug companies. Some of his largest fees have come from Canadian lumber producers seeking access to US markets.

9.Gerald Cassidy, Cassidy & Associates. The subject of a recent series of stories byWashington Post reporter Robert Kaiser, Cassidy has built one of DC’s largest lobbying organizations. It was once considered the wealthiest lobby shop in town, but recent figures show Cassidy fourth in reported revenues behind Patton Boggs, Akin Gump, and Van Scoyoc Associates.

Still, $28 million in annual billings, while down 10 percent from 2005, is very good, and Cassidy continues to attract business with his expertise in getting federal funding for universities, local governments, and even municipal school systems. As Boggs has put candy bars in the hands of soldiers, Cassidy once did a deal to get Ocean Spray fruit juices into public-school systems.

10.Michael House, Hogan & Hartson. A former chief of staff to Alabama senator Howell Heflin, House has what is believed to be the second- or third-largest lobbying account in Washington—that of Japanese automaker Nissan North America. Nissan’s lobbying invoice, according to Congressional Quarterly, is more than $2 million a year and makes up more than 10 percent of Hogan & Hartson’s lobby billings.

House, who lives in McLean, leads an effort by a coalition of mortgage banks and private lenders to increase regulations and restrictions on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two federally chartered mortgage companies they compete with.

11.John Merrigan, DLA Piper. With $46 million in annual lobbying revenues and some 40 active lobbyists, DLA Piper—the product of law-firm mergers over the years—rivals Patton Boggs as the largest lobby practice in town. It boasts such prominent names as former House leaders Dick Armey and Dick Gephardt and is chaired by former Senate majority leader George Mitchell, whose efforts on everything from brokering peace in Ireland to investigating steroid abuse in Major League Baseball have put DLA Piper front and center. But Capitol Hill types say the brains behind the lobbying practice is longtime partner John Merrigan, a Democrat whose business is expected to soar with his friends back in charge of Congress.

Showing how the worm has turned, the government of Turkey, which formerly relied on Robert Livingston’s GOP-oriented company, has hired DLA Piper. Even before the switch, Merrigan was hired by the state of Florida to prevent its military bases from being closed; none was. Demurs Merrigan: “It didn’t hurt that the governor [then Jeb Bush] has his own access to the chain of command.”

12.Wayne Berman, Ogilvy Government Relations. Republican lobbyist Berman was said to be only half kidding when he told the New York Times that it was time to buy a fishing pole and take some yoga classes. Shortly thereafter, he was signed by the Poker Players Alliance to work on ending the ban on electronic money transfers into online gaming sites—a $540,000 deal for Berman, who clearly isn’t hanging up his spurs.

In the Chinese oil company’s bid to buy Unocal, it was Berman who stirred up the hornet’s nest that killed the deal and allowed his client, Chevron, to buy Unocal for $2 billion less than the Chinese had offered. Berman’s take? A modest $360,000—some $1.8 million less than Akin Gump got from the losing party.

13/14.Kenneth M. Duberstein and Michael Berman, the Duberstein Group. A prominent pairing of Republican and Democrat, the Duberstein Group models its practice after the company founded by William Timmons, Timmons & Company, of which Duberstein was vice president.

Duberstein, a top aide and final chief of staff to President Reagan, frequently helps the White House with judicial nominations and other appointments. Berman, a longtime organizer of Democratic national conventions, was a top aide to Senator and then Vice President Walter Mondale and a close adviser to Bill and Hillary Clinton.

Part of the in crowd at the Palm, Duberstein and Berman are fixtures in the lobby establishment, looking after the legislative and tax interests of BP, Comcast, General Motors, Time Warner, and more.

15.John Breaux, Patton Boggs. Former US senators tend not to have great reputations as lobbyists. Some say they lack the organizational skills to put together a complex lobbying plan; others think they’re just uncomfortable bowing before their colleagues. Louisiana’s John Breaux, who left the Senate honestly—saying he needed to make money—is the exception to that notion. Working on energy and health issues and getting reconstruction projects for his native state, Breaux is said to have added as much as $4 million to Patton Boggs’s bottom line—double the $2 million Breaux is making at the firm on a contract.

The firm is no doubt happy, even if some Louisianans aren’t, that Breaux has shelved plans to leave Washington and run for governor of the Bayou State.

16.Martin Gold, Covington & Burling. Gold won’t win any awards from the online poker-playing community. He is said to have been the strategist behind the measure to block Internet gaming that was thrown into the port-security bill at the last moment last year by then–majority leader Bill Frist. According to lobby disclosure forms, Gold and his group were paid some $700,000 by the National Football League, a longtime client of Covington & Burling.

Some of the money was for work on other NFL problems, such as congressional hearings on steroids, but sources say most of it was for antigambling work. With House Finance Committee chair Barney Frank vowing to undo the antigaming measure, Gold is in business for another session.

During Frist’s first year as leader, Gold was his counsel, a post Gold once held for Frist predecessor Howard Baker. The pro-poker forces, who have now hired former GOP senator Alfonse D’Amato to reverse the ban, never had a chance.

17.David Johnson, Johnson, Madigan, Peck, Boland & Stewart. One of the savviest Democratic lobbyists in Washington, Johnson is a former adviser to Maine Democrats Edmund Muskie and George Mitchell. With the Democrats in the wilderness the past decade, Johnson had the wiles to join forces with the Republican lobby shop Boland & Madigan.

Michael Boland, a former aide to then–majority leader Trent Lott, and Peter Madigan, a trade official in the first Bush administration, carried the company during the GOP years; now Johnson promises to do the heavy lifting while the Democrats rule. He has beefed up ties to Senate Democrats by hiring Jeff Peck, a former top aide on the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Johnson has signed up some 15 new clients, including major drug manufacturers, who constantly need help with drug approvals and expiring patents. Altria Group, the tobacco company formerly known as Philip Morris, also pays Johnson $320,000 a year for his services.

18.Elliott Portnoy, Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal. It is unusual that a Chicago law firm would choose a 40-year-old Washingtonian as chair of its executive committee—and even more unusual that he would be the head of its lobby practice. Lobbyists don’t often get that much respect. But Portnoy has built his firm’s lobby practice into a $20-million business in a few years.

He has been heavily involved in asbestos legislation, for which he receives fees of $600,000 a year. He is also known for the work that made him a 1999 Washingtonian of the Year—his leadership of Kids Enjoy Exercise Now, a nonprofit that provides sports opportunities to children with disabilities.

19.Stewart Van Scoyoc, Van Scoyoc Associates. The founder of the second-largest lobby shop in Washington, with nearly $30 million in annual revenue, started out as a chemical engineer at the DuPont plant across the Delaware Memorial Bridge. He attended law school, on DuPont’s dollar, at the University of Maryland, and ended up in Washington in 1974 challenging allegations that chemicals were depleting the ozone layer. After what he calls “a good run” at DuPont, he was hired by now-retired tax lobbyist Charles Walker and did work for Anheuser-Busch, Weyerhaeuser, and the University of Alabama.

In 1990 Von Scoyoc opened his own company with eight clients. Now he has hundreds, many of them universities looking for special appropriations. Van Scoyoc also handles the lobbying account for Pakistan, which receives lots of US aid. He was adept at securing relief funds after the 2005 earthquake that killed 75,000 people there.

20.Robert Livingston, the Livingston Group. Between House speakers Newt Gingrich and Dennis Hastert was supposed to be Speaker Robert Livingston. A scandal, a resignation, and voilà—Livingston is making millions in lobbying fees and exercising influence that his former colleagues can only envy.

His 20 years on the House Appropriations Committee turned into a gusher for clients seeking tax advantages or loopholes. Livingston made less than $200,000 as a congressman from Louisiana. Now from the state’s agencies, colleges, and hospitals alone he brings in more than $700,000.

21.J. Steven Hart, Williams & Jensen. With legendary Washington lobbyist J.D. Williams retired in Oklahoma, his mantle has passed to fellow Sooner J. Steven Hart. He came to DC with the Reagan administration and was hired by Williams in 1984. A CPA with a law degree from Georgetown, Hart is the man corporations call when they’re having trouble with labor unions.

Among his clients are Coca-Cola, Continental Airlines, Pfizer, and the International Speedway Corporation, which runs the Daytona 500. Once a confidant of former Republican House leader Tom DeLay’s, Hart and his practice stand to suffer more than most while the Democrats keep the House.

22.John D. Raffaelli, Capitol Counsel. In 20 years as head of the Washington Group, East Texas native Raffaelli established himself as one of DC’s premier tax lobbyists. He came here to work for the late congressman Wright Patman, then joined the staff of Senator Lloyd Bentsen. Raffaelli began his lobbying career in partnership with Democratic fundraiser and former party chair Terry McAuliffe.

When the Republicans captured the White House in 2000, Raffaelli says he figured a name change to a more generic title, the Washington Group, might be a good idea. With the Democrats back in charge of the legislative branch, Raffaelli is starting over again with Capitol Counsel. He was compelled by agreement to leave his clients with Susan Molinari, who now runs his old firm, but new clients are said to be calling faster than you can say, “The Democrats are back.”

23.Victor Schwartz, Shook, Hardy & Bacon. Clients of a lobbyist who takes them to lunch at Subway can be reasonably sure he isn’t wasting their fees. An engaging former law professor, Schwartz has devoted his professional life to winning relief for clients from cumbersome or frivolous lawsuits.

One of his most important triumphs was a bill protecting manufacturers of small airplanes from liability suits if pilots crash their planes. For a coalition of veterinarians and pet-medicine manufacturers, Schwartz has been fighting legislation proposed by animal-rights groups that would allow pet owners to claim damages for pain and suffering in the event of animal injury or death.

24/25.Larry Harlow and Richard Tarplin, Timmons & Company. With the retirement of lobbying legend Tom Korologos, who cofounded this firm with William Timmons in 1975, the city’s most venerable lobby shop is now run by Democrat Richard Tarplin and Republican Bryce Larimore Harlow, known as Larry.

When the firm began, it limited the number of its clients to ten and charged a flat annual fee of $100,000.Today the firm maintains a roster of 24 clients who generally pay $360,000 a year.

Harlow once ran the government-relations arm of the Grocery Manufacturers Association. Tarplin, a former staffer for Senator Chris Dodd, is involved in legislation to bring more generic drugs to market. Other clients are Anheuser-Busch, DaimlerChrysler, and the University of Miami. Last year AT&T, after its merger with BellSouth, severed its relationship with Timmons, leading to one of the first down years for the company in nearly a decade. The administration still taps the firm for help with presidential nominations, though not as often as when Korologos was there.

26/27. Lanny Griffith and Ed Rogers, Barbour Griffith & Rogers. It isn’t every lobby firm that carries the name of a popular sitting governor, and it can’t hurt. Lanny Griffith, the CEO of what was Mississippi governor Haley Barbour’s lobbying firm, is a former Barbour campaign manager. He and Alabaman Ed Rogers, who cofounded the firm with Barbour in 1991, are two of the premier Republican lobbyists. Griffith has strong ties to the Bush family and was assistant secretary of Education under the first President Bush.

Barbour’s political success helped get the firm some $28 million in billings in 2006, some of it from Mississippi companies like agricultural giant Delta & Pine Land. The firm’s foreign clients include a Russian telecommunications company that has paid Griffith some $2 million since 2002 to get licenses to operate in the United States. After the Democratic sweep of Congress last year, at least 16 clients dropped the firm, costing it its largest source of revenue, a $4.5-million deal to promote Taiwan. Griffith says he has replaced all the lost business. “We find that in a divided Congress, the combat gets bigger and the stakes higher, and from the business side we still do pretty well,” he says.

28. David M. Carmen, the Carmen Group. A onetime speechwriter for the Republican National Committee, Carmen founded his lobbying company in 1985, when half a dozen companies paid a mere $20,000 a year for his services. He now has more than 70 employees and $15 to $20 million in annual revenues. He recently helped New Orleans–based Dillard University get a $200,000 federally backed loan.

Carmen Group senior adviser Constance Berry Newman, assistant secretary of State for African affairs in 2004–05, recently nailed down a $1-million-a-year contract to help the Nigerian state of Bayelsa win more oil revenues for development projects from the Nigerian government.

29/30. Thomas Downey and Raymond McGrath, Downey McGrath Group. Both are former congressmen from New York state. Downey founded the company with Washington Republican Rod Chandler, who left in 2000 to join PR giant Fleishman-Hillard. McGrath headed the beer lobby for years before joining Downey.

Downey’s receipts have been more modest than those of former colleagues like Vin Weber. But in 2006 he pulled in $300,000 from Dubai Ports World to work with Bob Dole to quell the uproar over its contract to manage six US ports. Their efforts were unsuccessful, and Dubai Ports World eventually sold its port operations to American conglomerate AIG.

31. Paul Magliocchetti, the PMA Group. A former House Appropriations Committee staffer with strong ties to powerful Democrat John Murtha, Magliocchetti is something of a legend in lobby circles. You won’t find his picture or bio on his firm’s Web site, and he usually doesn’t return calls from reporters. When he’s mentioned in the press, it’s generally in regard to his connections to Murtha, who chairs the Appropriations defense subcommittee.

In 2006, according to the Wall Street Journal, Murtha received more than $300,000 in contributions from Magliocchetti and his clients, who in turn won government contracts worth $95 million. Among his blue-chip roster: Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Boeing, and CACI International.

The Center for Public Integrity once listed PMA as the most successful defense-lobby shop in Virginia. Magliocchetti’s offices are near the Crystal City Metro station, not far from the Pentagon.

32. Bill Paxon, Akin Gump. A former congressman from Buffalo, Paxon was forced out of the Republican leadership by then-Speaker Newt Gingrich after a clumsy attempt to replace Gingrich. Paxon still has plenty of friends on Capitol Hill. The going rate for his services is about $600,000 a year, a sum currently paid by such clients as United Parcel Service and Boeing.

Paxon also represents Native American tribes, recording $800,000 from the Gila River community and $260,000 from the New York–based Seneca Nation. Public agencies in New York also sign on with him; the State University of New York system paid him $720,000 for help in getting federal funds. Paxon also represents the New York Yankees. He is married to congresswoman turned lobbyist Susan Molinari.

33. Nancy Taylor, Greenberg Traurig. Taylor is a onetime health-policy director on Senator Orrin Hatch’s Labor and Human Resources Committee, which had jurisdiction over much drug-patent legislation and food-and-drug laws. In 1993 Taylor took her expertise and connections to Greenberg Traurig, where she has built a $1-million-a-year-practice representing HMOs and other health organizations. Colleagues say as long as Hatch is in the Senate, Taylor will continue to bring in business.

34. Ronald Kaufman, Dutko Worldwide. A key operative in Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign, Kaufman has close ties to the Bush family. In 1984 he was Vice President Bush’s national campaign director; in 1988 he ran President Bush’s New Hampshire primary campaign and was a key fundraiser.

Kaufman joined Dutko Worldwide in 1994 and is due much credit for its success. The firm reported more than $33 million in revenue in 2006.Kaufman represents the state of Utah, and he has emerged as a top K Street supporter and fundraiser for presidential candidate Mitt Romney, who has a lot of support there.

35. Robert Raben, the Raben Group. Raben, a former aide to Congressman Barney Frank, saw his fortunes turn upward when his old boss took over the House Financial Services Committee. Up until now Raben, who once worked at the law firm Arnold & Porter, had traveled an unconventional path in Washington lobbying, earning $2 million lobbying for such tightfisted liberal pillars as the Brennan Center, the Alliance for Justice, and the American Civil Liberties Union as well as for gay- and Hispanic-rights organizations. He showed his political dexterity by aligning himself with movement conservatives like former Georgia congressman Bob Barr who also oppose some far-reaching provisions of the Patriot Act.

In the new era, Raben’s client list is starting to show signs of corporate influence. General Electric, Home Depot, and Pfizer have come calling in recent weeks, and XM Satellite Radio has asked his help in getting its merger with Sirius approved.

36. Vic Fazio, Akin Gump. One of several former officeholders in the law firm built by Robert Strauss, Vic Fazio is regarded as one of DC’s smartest and most effective lobbyists. In Congress he worked on the Armed Services Committee and later on Appropriations. At Akin Gump he advises such clients as medical-manufacturing giant Johnson & Johnson and works with a former colleague from across the aisle, Bill Paxon, on the $760,000 account of the casino-owning Agua Caliente tribe.

37/38. Gerry Sikorski and Rich Gold, Holland & Knight. Sikorski is a former Democratic congressman from Minnesota; Gold worked for Texas senator Lloyd Bentsen and then moved to the Environmental Protection Agency. Gold represents railroads, water districts, and many cities and counties with environmental issues.

Sikorski is Bahrain’s man in Washington—he helped negotiate the first free-trade agreement ever signed by the US government with a Persian Gulf state. Sikorski is said to have handled most of the congressional outreach and helped construct a PR campaign that allowed the agreement to happen.

39. Rodney Slater, Patton Boggs. This former secretary of Transportation in the Clinton administration didn’t go home to Arkansas when President Clinton left office, and the prospect of a second Clinton presidency does nothing to dull the perception that he still has influence. Coming out of the shadows of nearly a decade of Republican rule, Slater has emerged as a go-to lobbyist, especially in the airline industry, where he represents groups of airline pilots as well as Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport.

40. Kenneth Kies, Clark Consulting Federal Policy Group. Probably the leading pure tax lobbyist in Washington, Kies once was chair of the tax practice at the Washington office of white-shoe law firm Baker & Hostetler. He is a former chief counsel of the House Ways and Means Committee and later was chief of staff for the House-Senate Joint Committee on Taxation.

He joined Illinois-based Clark Consulting in 2002. His blue-chip client list on tax issues there is the best in town. Caterpillar, Michelin, and Microsoft all count on Kies to keep their taxes low in a political atmosphere that could require all of Kies’s contacts and experience.

41. Howard Vine, Dickstein Shapiro. A graduate of American University and George Mason law school, Vine began lobbying with the National Association of Manufacturers three decades ago and eventually was hired by Miami-based Greenberg Traurig to open its Washington office. He left Greenberg Traurig in 2003 because of his discomfort over the lobbying of former partner Jack Abramoff, now in federal prison after pleading guilty to fraud. If every Washington scandal has a hero, Vine is a nominee.

In addition to a full plate of work on behalf of energy companies trying to get research appropriations and tax benefits for more-efficient energy projects, Vine does pro bono work for groups promoting gay marriage and for the proposed National Music Center at DC’s old Carnegie Library.

42. Susan Molinari, the Washington Group. This bubbly former congresswoman pursued several career paths, including a stint as anchor for CBS News Saturday Morning, before finding her calling as a lobbyist. Molinari has been tapped by the worldwide PR agency Ketchum to be the top person in Washington for its lobbying subsidiary, where she is half of a lobbying duo with former Tom Daschle aide Rita Lewis.

Molinari and Lewis helped land the $4.6-billion appropriation for Hurricane Katrina relief on behalf of the Louisiana Recovery Authority. Molinari also carries the flag of the Republic of Panama. With several projects in the works there, including the widening of the canal, she should have no shortage of work. She lives with her husband, Akin Gump lobbyist Bill Paxon—they have never worked on a project together—in Alexandria and is working on the presidential campaign of Rudolph Giuliani.

43. Charles Brain, Capitol Hill Strategies. A former aide to once-powerful congressman Dan Rostenkowski, Brain saw his lobbying career going down when his boss and mentor went up the river for fraud and embezzlement. Brain left lobbying and joined the Clinton administration as a congressional liaison. When George W. Bush became president, Brain went to work for New York congressman Charles Rangel, now chair of Rostenkowski’s old committee, Ways and Means.

Back in business as a lobbyist, Brain is once again sought by corporations that want to get a hearing with the chair. Citigroup, Wachovia Bank, and Prudential are just three that shelled out more than $100,000 each in 2006 for Brain’s help.

44. Florence Prioleau, Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman. Prioleau was an assistant for domestic policy in the Carter administration, but her cachet now, like that of Charles Brain, is her longstanding association with Ways and Means chair Charles Rangel. Prioleau worked with Rangel from 1975 to 1979. After 20 years at Patton Boggs, this year Prioleau is suddenly a hot property.

The Goucher College and George­town law grad is married to sports agent Bill Strickland, who guided the early career of Andre Agassi. As part of her practice representing cities, Prioleau helps coordinate appropriations requests from clients such as Atlanta and Cleveland.

45/46. Bruce Mehlman and David Castagnetti, Mehlman Vogel Castagnetti. University of Virginia law grad Bruce Mehlman was once telecommunications-policy counsel for Cisco Systems, the big high-tech company. He went to the Commerce Department after that, and now he is one of the undisputed experts on high-tech issues. With strong GOP connections in the House of Representatives, where he has also worked, Mehlman attracts $322,000 a year from IBM and $240,000 from Hewlett-Packard—just two of some 30 regular clients.

The change to a Democratic Congress shouldn’t slow this firm much: Mehlman’s principal partner, David Castagnetti, was chief of staff for Senator Max Baucus, now chair of the Finance Committee, which oversees Social Security and related health programs. His clients include drug and pharmaceutical companies.

47. Heather Podesta, Heather Podesta & Partners. A former aide to Democratic Senator Bill Bradley and a graduate of the University of Virginia Law School, Podesta is well known as a patron of the arts. She and lobbyist husband Tony Podesta collect contemporary art and keep a home in Venice, Italy. After several years lobbying with a Philadelphia law firm, Podesta is on her own.

To say she has panache is an understatement. A Wall Street Journal profile revealed that she once had four female chefs from Seattle flown in for a fundraiser for Washington senator Maria Cantwell. In her first week on the job, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was seen giving Podesta a hug and a kiss. Since then, Podesta has signed up more than $100,000 a month in business, and more is likely on the way.

48. J.C. Watts, J.C. Watts Companies. Twice the most valuable player in the Orange Bowl, the former Oklahoma Sooner quarterback has parlayed his leadership skills into a six-company organization. Elected to Congress in 1994, he left in 2002 to go into lobbying.

He received $120,000 from the Bowl Championship Series last year and the same amount to represent the NASCAR auto-racing circuit. Watts has been sought out by traditionally black colleges and universities including Grambling and Mississippi Valley State. His personality, high profile, and ability to get along with allies and opponents alike put him in good position to continue to do well no matter who is in power.

49. Steven Elmendorf, Elmendorf Strategies. For this veteran Democratic operative, his party’s return to power signals lots of work. Elmendorf was senior adviser to former Democratic House majority leader Richard Gephardt, and he maintains close links with most of the House leaders and committee chairs. In 2006 Elmendorf was registered for only about $60,000 worth of business, but he is said to have tripled his client roster this year. He’s now working on a pension-reform bill for Northwest Airlines.

50. John Edward Porter, Hogan & Hartson. An Illinois congressman for 21 years, Porter helped write many laws on Social Security and public-health issues. Today he is considered one of the most knowledgeable lobbyists for clients like the American Red Cross, from whom he receives $160,000 a year. Porter also represents several colleges and takes an $80,000 fee to help get funding for Chicago’s Lincoln Park Zoo.

Tags: Top Lobbyists

hse sci comm 11/14 huffpo B johnson

rev door

...

Examples of the revolving door abound: former chief counsel Margaret Caravelli had joined the committee from the National Petrochemical and Refiners Association; she is now on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee staff. Dan Byers, the Energy and Environment Subcommittee staff director, went to the U.S. Chamberof Commerce’s Institute for 21st Century Energy Institute, its fossil-industry lobbying wing. Before Smith became committee chair, Environment Subcommittee staffer Clinton Woods came from the energy task force of the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council, where he helped the American Gas Association draft a report on “EPA’s hostility to fossil fuels.”

The committee's majority is now also home to a new generation of lobbyists for the fossil fuel industry. After the Energy and Environment subcommittee was split into two, it gained two new staff directors, Stephen Sayle for Energy and Allyne Todd Johnston for Environment. Given their backgrounds, the subcommittees could more appropriately be named Fracking and Coal.

Sayle is a prominent fossil-industry lobbyist who got his start with Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas). In the 1990s, he was the chief counsel for Barton’s investigations into EPA fine particle air quality rules. While a top lobbyist at the Dutko and Dow Lohnes lobbying shops, Sayle’s clients included a cavalcade of oil, gas, and coal companies and front groups: Duke Energy, Cinergy, Chevron, Iroquois Gas, National Grid, Calpine, ITC, Tenaska, PSEG, Tesoro, the American Chemical Council, the National Petrochemical and Refiners Association, and the Electric Power Supply Association. (Sayle also represented the Environmental Working Group, an environmental health research and advocacy group, on toxic-chemical regulation in 2010.) Sayle was one of The Hill’s top lobbyists of 2012 for his “background on the House Energy and Commerce Committee.”

Sayle’s return to the committee is somewhat surprising –- the energy subcommittee primarily has jurisdiction over the Department of Energy science labs, which focus on nuclear research, advanced biofuels, battery technology, and climate research -– not well aligned with Sayle’s focus on natural-gas and petrochemical lobbying.

However, the explosive growth of fracking in the nation in the past decade has raised serious new scientific questions about the risks and benefits of this formerly obscure method of extracting natural gas. How the federal government responds to scientific evidence of fracking’s threat to water supplies and our climate is a multi-billion-dollar question. That Republicans would add a fracking lobbyist to the House Science Committee is hardly surprising: Obama’s new Secretary of Energy is Ernest Moniz, a natural-gas-industry-funded scientist expected to steer the agency towards supporting oil and gas development.

Johnston came to the House Science Committee in 2013 from the staff of Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.), where he was the chief climate policy advisor for the senator, a climate-science conspiracy theorist. Prior to that, Johnston was the Director of Air Quality for the coal industry’s primary trade group, the National Mining Association, from 2005 to 2007. During his tenure, he worked as a representative of the “Coarse Particle Coalition,” a group of gravel, cement and minerals groups that aimed to block scientifically backed soot standards during the George W. Bush administration.

Johnston then joined Sen. George Voinovich’s (R-Ohio) staff, drafting climate legislation in 2007 that supported a continued increase in greenhouse pollution and massive subsidies for the coal industry. In 2011 he moved to Inhofe’sstaff, replacing Tom Hassenboehler when that operative moved over to America’s Natural Gas Alliance.

Johnston and Sayle declined comment for this story. According to committee Republican press aide Zachary Kurz, thecommittee has a policy of not making staffers available for public comment.

Environmentalists say industry groups are taking advantage of the key staff placements to help drive their plans.

“Industrial polluters are using the back rooms of Congress in this traditionally sleepy committee to assert an extreme corporate agenda,” clean-air advocate John Walke of the Natural Resources Defense Council argued in a telephone interview. “If you connect the dots, the agenda is to systematically bias the system, whether by weakening conflict of interest standards when corporations serve on scientific advisory bodies or thwarting regulations that address industrial pollution.”

The ties between the committee's Republicans and oil, gas and coal groups run deeper than staffing, of course. Press accounts in recent years have noted that fossil fuel interests have donated large amounts to Republicans on the House Science Committee.

==

==

http://www.propublica.org/podcast/item/the-timess-eric-lipton-on-dcs-ecosystem-of-influence

highlights of their discussion:

• The ways his piece took reporting on lobbying to the next level by focusing not just on who was donating, but also on the outcomes of the contributions. While causality is generally hard to establish, Umansky says, "this seemed much more clearly quid pro quo." (2:33)
• How Lipton organized reams of source material -- including 6,000 pages of emails resulting from open-records requests in 25 states -- to begin building his article. "It was almost as if the open-records responses were writing the story," says Lipton, who moved to a library in at The Times’s office and stacked piles of paper to make sense of it all. (7:31)
• The “ecosystem of influence,” where the role of the traditional, registered lobbyist is “becoming less and less important and interesting," Lipton says. "It’s the broad campaign that corporations are creating, and all the surrogates that are being paid, often without disclosure – that’s the play that I think is most interesting in the lobbying world." (13:47)

Top Lobbying Entities ($100,000+)

(7/1/2014 - 9/30/2014)

Clients: 10,688

Total: $309,899,655| No. | Name | Clients | Amount |

==

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D1567511376/captainnemosfredA/102-9947990-6169731

silverstein ken 1998 10 mill/day

==

bill lynn got waiver from BO policy no lobby sec of def asst raytheon

going stealth http://www.opensecrets.org/news/2014/03/waning-influence-part-1-tracking-the-unlobbyist/

Brownstein, Hyatt, Farber & Schreck raked in $142,820,000.

Brownstein, Hyatt, Farber & Schreck raked in $142,820,000.

Caesars Palace

Caesars Palace

2012 lobbying income: $11,400,000

Top three clients and how much they paid:

Coalition to Reform the Foreign Investment In Real Property Tax Act of 1980: $380,000

Apollo Advisors: $340,000

Caesar's Entertainment Operating Co.: $300,000

Brownstein, Hyatt, Farber & Schreck was founded in 1968 by three University of Colorado graduates. Today, the firm is home to 510 employees, 260 of whom are attorneys and policy consultants.

Data from OpenSecrets.org

Hogan & Hartson earned $154,753,907.

Hogan & Hartson earned $154,753,907.

Wikimedia Commons

2009 lobbying income: $18,160,000*

Top three clients and how much they paid:

Nissan North America: $2,300,000

Anschutz Corp: $520,000

TPG: $510,000

Hogan & Hartson merged with Lovells in 2009, The Washington Post reported at the time. That merger made the newly created company one of the world's biggest law firms.

*Most recent data available

Data from OpenSecrets.org

Quinn Gillespie & Associates pulled in $160,508,500.

Quinn Gillespie & Associates pulled in $160,508,500.

Quinn Gillespie & Associates

QGR's John Feehry and Jack Quinn

2012 lobbying income: $4,030,000

Top three clients and how much they paid:

Gamesa Corporacion Tecnologica SA: $280,000

HEB Grocery: $240,000

Qualcomm Inc: $240,000

QGA really tries to work with both sides of the aisle, claiming it's "the first bipartisan firm" to handle both government relations and strategic communications. The firm was founded in 2000 by Democrat Jack Quinn and Republican Ed Gillespie.

Data from OpenSecrets.org

Holland & Knight earned $166,954,544.

Holland & Knight earned $166,954,544.

Jicarilla Apache Nation

Jicarilla Apache Nation

2012 lobbying income: $8,860,000

Top three clients and how much they paid:

National Fisheries Institute: $360,000

Jicarilla Apache Nation: $260,000

Praxair Inc.: $240,000

The National Law Journal and the Legal Times ranked Holland & Knight as the best lobbying law firm in 2011.

Data from OpenSecrets.org

Ernst & Young raked in $182,266,737.

Ernst & Young raked in $182,266,737.

AP

2012 lobbying income: $6,840,000

Top three clients and how much they paid:

Ernst & Young (yes, it's one of its own clients): $960,000

General Electric: $300,000

Retail Industry Leaders Association: $200,000

Ernst & Young is both an auditing firm and a lobbying firm. It came under fire in recent years for lobbying on behalf of the same clients it audited, Reuters reported in March.

However, Reuters reported in May that Ernst & Young had severed lobbying ties with three of the companies it audited following the criticism.

Data from OpenSecrets.org

Williams & Jensen acquired $213,534,000.

Williams & Jensen acquired $213,534,000.

Williams & Jensen

J. Steven Hart, Williams & Jensen Chairman and CEO

2012 lobbying income: $9,100,000

Top three clients and how much they paid:

Bloomberg LP: $290,000

AEGON NV: $260,000

Owens-Illinois: $220,000

Williams & Jensen focuses primarily on lobbying, not other aspects of legal practice. Most of the firm's attorneys come from government service, having first worked in congressional or senate offices or other areas of the administration.

Data from OpenSecrets.org

Van Scoyoc Associates secured $297,003,000.

Van Scoyoc Associates secured $297,003,000.

Wikimedia Commons

2012 lobbying income: $10,850,000

Top three clients and how much they paid:

Coalition of EPSCoR States: $230,000

MacAndrews & Forbes: $180,000

University of Alabama: $180,000

Van Scoyoc Associates was founded "with three employees, eight clients, and a 5-pound cell phone," founder and president H. Stewart Van Scoyoc says on the company's website.

The firm touts its equal numbers of Republican and Democratic employees as one of its biggest assets.

Data from OpenSecrets.org

Cassidy & Associates pulled in $353,245,000.

Cassidy & Associates pulled in $353,245,000.

Wikimedia Commons

Boston University Theater

2012 lobbying income: $7,780,000

Top three clients and how much they paid:

Boston University: $480,000

MGM Resorts International: $300,000

Volta Technologies: $220,000

The firm claims ethics are its top priority, touting the fact that it implemented an ethics training program more than 20 years ago. Cassidy & Associates also employs a full-time general counsel and outside counsel.

Data from OpenSecrets.org

Akin, Gump, Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP raked in $376,305,000.

Akin, Gump, Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP raked in $376,305,000.

Gila River Indian Community of Arizona

Gila River Indian Community Gov. Gregory Mendoza (right) stands with President Obama as he signs the HEARTH Act

2012 lobbying income: $15,480,000

Top three clients and how much they paid:

Gila River Indian Community: $1,380,000

KKR & Co.: $300,000

Moody's Corp: $300,000

The firm specializes in American Indian law and policy. That work includes defending tribal rights as well as lobbying on behalf of its tribal clients.

Data from OpenSecrets.org

Patton Boggs LLP earned $464,142,000.

Patton Boggs LLP earned $464,142,000.

Patton Boggs LLP

Thomas Hale Boggs, Jr., Firm Partner

2012 lobbying income: $23,925,000

Top three clients in 2012 and how much they paid:

Ivanishvili, Bidzina: $760,000

Depository Trust & Clearing Corp: $600,000

Wholesale Markets Brokers Association: $530,000

"Our partners include women and men with extensive backgrounds in government service with strong ties to both major political parties," Patton Boggs brags on its website.

Data from OpenSecrets.org

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/the-10-top-lobbying-firms-2012-8?op=1#ixzz2xHPDniaV

http://www.opensecrets.org/news/2014/03/waning-influence-part-1-tracking-the-unlobbyist.html

Beginning in 2010, the Center for Responsive Politics documented a new trend in lobbying: the rise of the "unlobbyist." The number of federally registered lobbyists who were active in a particular year began dropping in 2008 and has continued every year since. Our report last year showed that 46 percent of those who stopped lobbying in 2012 were actually still employed by the same firm. We argued that many of these ex-lobbyists simply shifted their job responsibilities slightly so as to avoid disclosure requirements and fly "under the radar."

Here, we're extending our previous work. Through extensive research, we tracked the post-lobbying career paths of almost 1,800 registered, previously active lobbyists and found a similar pattern: Nearly half of them continued to work for the same companies -- and some even still had job titles like "Director of Government Relations." From these findings, it seems clear that lobbyists are not fleeing K Street in droves, but rather they are doing similar work for the same companies. Instead of doing it in the public eye, though, they have moved out of sight.

Where are they now

The number of active lobbyists fell from 12,433 in 2012 to 12,279 in 2013. One possible explanation for this decline is that some have altered their activities just enough to avoid the reporting thresholds despite doing much the same work as they did in previous years. These "unlobbyists" are not uncommon, and there are many examples of prominent former government employees working for -- or sometimes running -- lobbying firms whose names never appear on lobbying disclosure forms.

For example, former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) both work for major lobbying firms, but neither have ever formally registered as lobbyists.

To see whether lobbyists are continuing to move "under the radar," we investigated the professional whereabouts of all lobbyists who were active in 2012 but did not report lobbying in 2013. We refer to these people as having "deactivated." This is a somewhat different group than those who "deregistered," a term with a specific legal meaning that is harder to measure due to data limitations.

In 2008, following the passage of the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2007 (HLOGA) -- passed in response to the Jack Abramoff scandal -- more than 3,400 individuals who had lobbied the year before disappeared from the official rolls. In 2012, there were 1,700 fewer active lobbyists than in 2011, and about the same number -- 1,788 -- fell away between 2012 and 2013.

As of early 2014, 45 percent of lobbyists who were active in 2012 but not 2013 were still working for the same employer for whom they lobbied in 2012. In 2013, we performed asimilar analysis of lobbyists who deactivated in 2012 and found that about 46 percent were still with the same employer. The deactivated lobbyists who stayed were again the largest category in 2014. About a third of deactivated lobbyists moved to a different organization, with 14 percent staying in a similar industry and 19 percent going to a different industry. A small handful exited the job market altogether, either through retirement or death. We were unable to find information on 14 percent of the lobbyists who deactivated during 2013....

==

lee fang on lobbying deregister

http://www.thenation.com/blog/178494/lee-fang-rise-shadow-lobbying#

http://www.thenation.com/print/article/178460/shadow-lobbying-complex

Lee Fang | February 19, 2014

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 slice 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 escapades 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 a third straight year, overall spending on lobbying decreased. Lobbyists themselves continue to deregister. 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.