Last week the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle reported that New York Lieutenant Governor Robert Duffy had applied for a job with the Rochester Business Alliance (RBA), a local chamber of commerce and business lobbying group. Duffy confirmed in an interview with the Democrat & Chronicle that on October 5th he had interviewed for the group’s …
Quiet Names
Opponents of minimum wage increase in NYS tap a notorious tobacco lobbyist
Opponents of the proposed minimum wage increase in New York State have tapped a notorious tobacco and fast food lobbyist to help them make their case. One of Berman’s industry front groups, the Employment Policies Institute, published an op-ed in the Buffalo News last week that argued that an increase in the minimum wage would …
Super PAC Watch: Romney Mystery Donors Include Prominent Predatory Loan Execs
Among the recent large donors to Mitt Romney’s Super PAC Restore Our Future are still more corporations “not easily connected to a specific executive or even business,” Nicholas Confessore writes in a February 20 New York Times blog post. LittleSis has found that two of these new Romney backers, neither of whom the Times looked …
US subsidiary AIG to pay $100 million in bonuses
The Washington Post is reporting that AIG is set to pay $100 million in employee bonuses today: American International Group plans Wednesday to pay another round of employee bonuses, worth about $100 million, said several people familiar with the matter, a year after similar payments at the bailed-out insurance giant infuriated many Americans and inflamed …
Landrieu phone squad: the Boustany connection
The four conservative activists arrested for tampering with the phones of Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu earlier this week have been linked to the Pelican Institute, a conservative New Orleans think tank. Pelican is a relatively new organization, but it appears to have strong ties to members of the state’s Republican elite, most notably Representative Charles …
Bernanke lobbyist authored Enron/Cheney energy plan
The same lobbyist that sold Washington on Enron is now touting Ben Bernanke. According to Politico, former Enron lobbyist Linda Robertson has been managing Bernanke’s confirmation effort on behalf of the Federal Reserve — coaching him through the process in much the same way she coached Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling through the Washington influence …
How to Profile Investors on LittleSis
In response to a couple of questions I’ve received from analysts lately, I wanted to provide a simple set of instructions for profiling investors on LittleSis. Why Profile Investors? When prominent investors such as John Paulson make investment decisions, it can have a large impact on the public perception of a given industry. For example: …
Who works for AHIP?
The healthcare reform fight is heating up on Capitol Hill, pitting the health insurance industry, big pharma, the docs, the hospitals, the medical tech industry, and the biotech industry against…well, I’m not exactly sure. A very scary coalition of uninsured people, the middle class, unions, and liberal think tanks? Perhaps the lines are not so …
Who is Michael Froman?
The dominant analysis of Obama’s historic fundraising effort is that small donors carried the day. His campaign certainly inspired record-smashing levels of small donor support, but the feel-good story of Obama lifted to victory by a $5 army obscures the crucial role that traditional fundraising mechanisms and networks played in Obama’s campaign. After all, Obama …
Who is Mort Downey?
LittleSis brings transparency to the quiet names: people who are not necessarily officeholders, who may not be very well-known, but who exert significant influence over the policymaking process. They make decisions and advocate for policies that affect our lives in profound ways, but we are not well-equipped to hold them accountable or understand their sphere …