The Commercial Energy Working Group is one of the many lobbying organizations in Washington. It makes recommendations to federal agencies and tries to sway lawmakers on policies. It engages in the basic political work of making the government friendlier to business.
There’s only one problem: Whom the Commercial Energy Working Group actually represents is a secret.
This violates federal lobbying and ethics laws, according to Public Citizen’s Tyson Slocum, who has urged the House and Senate to investigate the matter. “The Commercial Energy Working Group is one of the most active – and secret – organizations seeking to undermine energy market regulations,” Slocum told The Intercept. “The purpose of my complaint is to force the group to start identifying its membership.”
Under the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2007, all lobbying organizations registered with the federal government must list the name of any business that has contributed more than $5,000 to them in any one quarter. But the CEWG “does not disclose the individual companies or entities that constitute its active membership,” according to Slocum’s letter.
The group has no website, does not file annual reports with the IRS, and hasn’t sought incorporation in any state. It operates out of a D.C. law firm – Sutherland Asbill & Brennan – and used the Sutherland offices as its formal business address in its initial 2013 lobbyist disclosure form. CEWG’s official lobbyists, Alexander Holtan and Blair Scott, are employees of Sutherland.
Sutherland has listed lobbying income between $10,000 and $60,000 for its “client” CEWG every quarter since mid-2013, with a total of $130,000 in lobbying income in 2015.
That money is coming from someplace, but CEWG and Sutherland refuse to say where.
Sutherland did not respond to The Intercept’s request for clarification.
CEWG routinely files comments with federal agencies and lawmakers about various regulations. It wrote House Agriculture Committee members last June, calling on them to support the Commodity End-User Relief Act, which would have exempted certain companies from complying with derivatives rules.
It submitted comments in 2013 to international banking regulators over margin requirements for derivatives, and did the same in 2014 to five U.S. regulators. It frequently files comments with other agencies like the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the Federal Reserve.
In all of these comment letters, Sutherland Asbill & Brennan submits “on behalf of the Commercial Energy Working Group.” The CEWG is variously described as “a diverse group of commercial firms in the energy industry,” or “energy producers, marketers, and utilities,” or “some of the largest users of energy derivatives in the United States and globally.” But it never specifically names its members.
A member of the CEWG even sits on the Energy and Environmental Markets Advisory Committee of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), which maintains federal oversight of derivatives. Ron Oppenheimer, an associate member of the advisory committee, is listed as a “representative” of CEWG. But he actually works as a senior vice president and general counsel for Vitol, a Swiss-based derivatives trading company.
When Slocum asked Oppenheimer to disclose the membership of CEWG at a public meeting of the CFTC advisory committee last month, he refused. Oppenheimer said the working group had no plans to make that information public.
“If you feel entitled to formally provide advice to the government about how your members need relief from regulations, you’ve got to tell us who your members are,” Slocum told The Intercept.
Holtan, the CEWG lobbyist, represented a similar-sounding group, the Working Group of Commercial Energy Firms, while working at a different law firm, Hunton & Williams. When Holtan, previously a law clerk for the Senate Banking Committee, switched jobs in 2012, he apparently took the energy lobbying group with him and tweaked the name slightly.
In his letter, Slocum identified four other potential members of the CEWG, based on Freedom of Information Act disclosures. A CFTC “external meeting” with the CEWG on April 15, 2015, identifies participants from Vitol, ConocoPhillips, and Royal Dutch Shell. External meetings on June 10 and July 28 similarly had Vitol’s Ron Oppenheimer and ConocoPhillips executive James Allison present. A 2013 CFTC meeting with the CEWG featured representatives of Hess Corporation and NextEra Energy Resources, in addition to Vitol and Royal Dutch Shell.
While one can surmise that those five companies are part of the Commercial Energy Working Group, nobody has verified that. Three of the companies also showed up in a 2011 meeting between the CFTC and its apparent precursor, the Working Group of Commercial Energy Firms, which included Vitol, ConocoPhillips, NextEra, Cargill, and Constellation Energy. A 2011 meeting with the Securities and Exchange Commission had representatives from the same companies listed above, plus Hess, BP, Shell, Luminant, and DTE Energy.
If all of those companies contributed less than $5,000 per quarter to the lobbying organization, there would be no violation. But since the CEWG never discloses the names, Slocum is seeking a formal investigation.
The single most transformative and revolutionary government reform would be universal whistleblower protection. Oligarchy, legal and illegal corruption and influence peddling is only possible if kept out of sight. Secrecy in industrial practices such as deleterious/hazardous working conditions, improper containment/control/dumping of hazardous materials/waste, safety record of consumer/market goods and fairness of worker wages allows owners/operators/politicians (drink freely of the ‘safe’ water in Flint) to maximize profits at consumer ignorance. This also translates to intellectual property laws where control/ownership of patents has hindered competition and concentrated profits in the owner class.
The best way to ensure a geopolitical/economic system with greatest flexibility, fairness and competition is to maximize transparency and make all information freely available.
It’s simple they work for Satan….duuuuhhhh!
“CEWG routinely files comments with federal agencies and lawmakers about various regulations.”
I do not understand how that is a valid statement given that your only examples are a few letters that were given to legislators spread out over years.
If you do not know that there are donors of more than $5k, than how is this news?
Who are the donors to Tyson Slocum’s group?
You are writing an article in support of one lobbyist to bash another. The evidence you cite to support your position is wholly based on Slocum’s statements.
In short, the reporting on this website is going downhill fast. It’s not the inherent bias that is causing my feeling, it’s the sheer lazy reporting. And these comments I’m reading from others are only re-enforcing my opinion. Why is it that no matter what gets posted here, yall are just attaboy every step of the way?
Hold the reporters here to the same standards you have for all those you hate. This “news” piece is just a crap editorial.
For someone who complains about shoddy reporting, your reply is just that: a shoddy vitriolic attack. You seem to hold a grudge and you’re not even that good at hiding it: “Hold reporters here to the same standards you have for all those you hate”. First of all, who are “those you hate.” What are you gibbering on about? Didn’t anyone teach you to backup statements with evidence and not with ad hominem attacks?
If not, that’s okay. I’ll teach you right here by picking apart that shoddy writing you call a reply.
1. Your statement: “Who are the donors to Tyson Slocum’s group? You are writing an article in support of one lobbyist to bash another.” This sounds way too personal. More subjective than objective. So what if Slocum is lobbyist? What is your actual point? Public Citizen, unlike Commercial Energy Working Group, has a website and clearly defines it objectives. If you bothered to research, you’d also know that Public Citizen lists its Major Donors in an annual report: http://www.citizen.org/documents/PC%20News%202015%20Annual%20Report.pdf Feel free to look them up. I doubt it matters. It took me less than a minute of google searching to find that page. The fact that you couldn’t means either one of two things: A. You really don’t care about facts or B. You’re pretty darn stupid (either of which leads me to the fact that I won’t bother replying to you again because it’d be a waste of time and foolish of me to respond to someone with either of those 2 characteristics. I’m replying to you now only to call you out for one of these two things so that other people don’t bother wasting their time replying to you or so that the admins delete your post).
2. Your statement: “Evidence you cite to support your position is wholly based on Slocum’s statements.” FALSE. Look up the definition of the word wholly and modify your statement. There are numerous statements within the article that can be used as evidence, however circumstantial, that this lobbying group is indeed shady at the very least. I’ll give you just one example and that alone is enough simply because you misused the word “wholly.”
Example: Holtan, the CEWG lobbyist, represented a similar-sounding group, the Working Group of Commercial Energy Firms, while working at a different law firm, Hunton & Williams. When Holtan, previously a law clerk for the Senate Banking Committee, switched jobs in 2012, he apparently took the energy lobbying group with him and tweaked the name slightly. [Note that there are hyperlinks in this paragraph that point to evidence that is not a statement of Slocum].
Even if the evidence were based wholly on Slocum’s statements, your statement would be misleading AND hypocritical at best. That’s because you had no problem criticizing Public Citizen for not listing their donors (which they do) and for criticizing the author for calling out this lobbyist for actually hiding their donors.
3. If you do not know that there are donors of more than $5k, than how is this news?
It’s news because the lobbyist is being shady in its tactics to influence government position. Its worth bringing to our attention because a lot of readers, and Americans support initiatives in favor of clean,renewable energy and would be alarmed to find a shady company or shady individuals attempting to undermine that. You may not feel that way (it seems like you’ve already made up your mind), but many other people do. By the way, Sutherland was given a chance to clarify but chose not to respond to The Intercept’s request for clarification”. What do they have to hide? And why feel the need to defend them so badly?
The fact that you can get that technical and go that out of the way to make a point that’s subjective and illogical serves as further proof that this is very personal for you. Why can’t you just come out and say what’s really on your mind?
3. You paragraph: “In short, the reporting on this website is going downhill fast…… yall are just attaboy every step of the way?” Way to go with your own inherent bias! Those who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.
And just to make it clear if you didn’t get it by now (in case it’s point B), I wholly support the need to increase our dependency on clean, renewable energy and decrease dependency on fossil fuels.
Last point: As you begin to write up yet another “reply” (using either charliethreee or another troll name), refer back to my last statements in #1 as motivational fodder).
Well said, nicely done. Of course helping the trolls do their job better is a problem, but he probably can’t get paid for this piece if his employers do any auditing.
It’s shit like this that tells me the climate crisis will just exacerbate in the future. The energy companies won’t rest until they take the flaming planet down the memory holes of capitalist greed and deceit. Too bad, it was a really, really nice planet.
One way to find a lot of relevant information on this outfit is to look into the parent legal company, and a productive route is this kind of search at Google:
“sutherland asbill & brennan” filetype:pdf
This turns up some 20,000 results – interesting things like legal filings and slideshows. Limit the search by putting terms like (for example) ‘Enron’ at the end, you get 1,400 results – many legal filings related to the Enron bankruptcy. They’ve been at this for a while.
Using “Clean Power Plan”, you can find that Sutherland Asbill & Brennan participated in the Supreme Court filing that led to the stay on the EPA’s Clean Power Plan (before Scalia’s demise). That one is worth reading.
Source:Environmental Defense Fund has it on their website.
To find it, Google this: 2016.02.05 utilities reply_in_support_of_stay
More searching comes up with slides revealing more of the fossil fuel industry’s strategy to block the Clean Power Plan, for example: “No matter how EPA proceeds from here the litigation will be unprecedented at the federal and state level. Key for coops, utilities and other operators of fossil-fired units is to successfully prove that the rule violates the Clean Air Act.”
Source:webcasts.acc
Google this: 9.17.14_Ene_LQH
And here’s something on the Canadian version of the CEWG (same lobbyist, though) “The Working Group is a diverse group of commercial firms that are active in the Canadian energy industry . . . Members of the Working Group are producers, processors, merchandisers, and owners of energy commodities.”
Source: Canadian government
Google this: com_20140319_91-304_the-canadian-commercial-energy-working-group
Here’s a fairly sleazy joint Chevron/Sutherland presentation on how to sell natural gas to Congress and the Executive branch while also attacking renewable energy generation:
Source: Georgia Tech Univ
Google: 20110928_consolidatedNaturalGas
These are some busy little PR monkeys, it seems – but why all the secrecy, cut-outs, astroturf efforts, etc? What it comes down to is that in polls, over 80% of the American public support a transition to renewable energy and away from fossil fuels, along the lines of the German energy transition away from coal and nuclear (the ‘Energiewende’) and towards renewable energy – with all the benefits that entails, such as cleaner air and water, and the end of reliance on foreign fossil fuel cartels (OPEC), which has big domestic economic benefits.
If the fossil fuel corporations where to represent themselves, it would be counterproductive – if BP went to Congress, after the BP oil spill, they’d be pretty unpopular. If Royal Dutch Shell did, they’d risk being condemned for Arctic oil drilling efforts. ConocoPhillips, a major tar sand operator in Alberta, Canada, would face criticism over tar sands pollution and high costs. They might be asked about their financial support for anti-scientific global warming denialism.
Hence, if they want something done – say, they want the conservative political operators on the Supreme Court to block the EPA’s Clean Power Plan, or they want Congress and the White House to support crude oil and coal exports, or block renewable energy R&D programs at the Department of Energy, they send their teams of trained monkeys out to lobby on their behalf – while doing all they can to keep themselves invisible.
““If you feel entitled to formally provide advice to the government about how your members need relief from regulations, you’ve got to tell us who your members are,” Slocum told The Intercept.”
that’s in the small print of the 1A after the enumerated right to petition the govt for redress of grievances.
I am shocked that wealthy interests would flaunt the law. Shocked.
You meant “flout” not “flaunt”, but I agree.
“But the CEWG “does not disclose the individual companies or entities that constitute its active membership,” according to Slocum’s letter.
The group has no web site, does not file annual reports with the IRS, and hasn’t sought incorporation in any state.”
More corporate scum working to hurt the American people. These are enemy combatants! I say waterboard them until they say who’s paying them, and for what.
Which is what the FBI says about Apple. Pretty much the same thing, really, except nobody expects ordinary people to have their confidences actually kept except on paper, in a privacy policy or something with equally little relevance to the real world.
Although Mr. Ronald S. Oppenheimer does not currently list Koch industries as one of his past employers on his Likedin resume, he was hired by Entergy-Koch as an Executive Vice President and their General Counsel in Dec 2003. Mr Oppenheimer made the transition from Merrill Lynch & Co. Inc to Entergy-Koch shortly after the federal Commodity Futures Trading Commission subpoenaed the company in an effort to gain more information about its alleged involvement in “wash” trades of gas futures. Wash trades are transactions in which a trader sells a gas or electricity future contract to another trader then immediately buys the contract back at the same price. The transactions can be used to artificially inflate trading volumes and make the market seem more active than it is. The practice is prohibited in markets governed by the CFTC because it is viewed as a misleading tactic that damages the overall integrity of the market.
The commission had already determined that Entergy-Koch had made 61 wash trades on a now-defunct energy trading Web site operated by Enron. The report says Entergy-Koch made 24 wash trades within five minutes on March 26, 2001 at the height of a price manipulation scheme by Enron during the 2001 California energy crisis. Although Entergy-Koch spokeswoman Stephanie Goodman reiterated Entergy-Koch 2002 claim that it had investigated the matter internally and found no evidence of wash trades during the period in question, the company agreed in Jan 2004 to pay a civil penalty of $3 million to the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission for reporting false price information in its natural gas trading business in 2001. Entergy-Koch was sold to Merril Lynch in Nov of 2004.
While Mr. Ronald S. Oppenheimer served as general counsel for Merrill Lynch (2004-2009), Merrill Lynch was a party to rampant speculation in the energy markets by Koch Industries, Goldman Sachs, Vitol, and numerous commercial banks that were directly connected with the 2008 financial collapse. It appears that at least twenty corporations were themselves secretly driving the price of oil sky high while steering its investors into the overly-inflated market, only to simultaneously bet that the whole thing would come crashing down via put options.
In 2009, Mr. Ronald S. Oppenheimer decided to advance his career by becoming Senior Vice President and General Counsel for Vitol Inc.. As some of you might recall, Vitol and dozens of other firms were accused of paying kickbacks to Iraq in 2005 by a commission that probed the United Nation’s Oil for Food program; Vitol was eventually fined $17.5m after pleading guilty in Nov 2007. A 2011 Reuters article observed that Vitol was one of an exclusive group of loosely regulated whose status as commodity traders exempts them from the oversight of U.S. and European regulators who had been recently tasked to crack down on the type of big bank and hedge fund speculators whose highly speculative schemes caused the global financial meltdown in 2008:
The article went on to describe Vitol’s role in supplying rebel forces in Libya with oil during its civil war, and to the “besieged government of Bashar al-Assad in Syria as his troops attacked civilians.”
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-commodities-houses-idUSTRE79R4S320111028
So far as I’ve ever heard, these lobbyist laws aren’t like the laws for Joe Schmuck who puts $4,000 a month in his bank account for three months and comes back to find the whole account stolen because he could have reported it as more than $10,000 in income. They can just deposit $4,999 a quarter like clockwork, no worries about people thinking they’re trying to contribute something just under the current de facto limit. And $10,000 to $60,000 is 2 to 12 such donations.
The main reason I doubt they did anything wrong is that, hell, don’t the lobbyists write these bogus “campaign finance reforms” to start with? Or at least make sure there are always loopholes for them to use? I’ve been hearing “campaign finance reform” since the 1970s … never happens … never will happen. The Republican base will get that Roe v. Wade repeal they’re always being promised before we ever see a genuine limit on campaign finance. I expect a tennis match between the Mahdi and Bonnie Prince Charlie will be on TV that day.
But that’s really not as bad a thing as some might make it out to be. Because how can the government actually tell whether you’ve taken out $5,000 worth of Backpage ads and MySpace design consulting and Twitter SEO advice to help your online campaigning or not? They can’t do that without some level of All-Seeing Eye that even the NSA would envy.
Truth is, we need INCOME reform, not how-we-spend-our-income-on-politics reform. You can’t have a society where everybody is on pins and needles afraid the Massa will exile them to the sewers if they have a wrinkle in their pants, but then they all go vote as equals. Not gonna happen. So quit pretending.
Nice one, but just in case nobody’s mentioned it yet Sutherland is heavily involved and close biz ties to the Koch brothers, for example:
https://www.linkedin.com/title/senior-counsel,-trading
http://www.sutherland.com/Experience/185527/Achieved-a-favorable-pre-award-security-arbitration-decision-on-behalf-of-Koch-Shipping-Inc
Recommended Reading:
Listen, Liberal by Thomas Frank
Buyer’s Remorse by Bill Press
Dark Money by Jane Mayer
The Devil’s Chessboard by David Talbot
Wealth, Power, and the Crisis of Laissez Faire Capitalism by Donald Gibson
Welcome to the oligarchy called USA
The Supreme Court ruled that Alabama’s demand for NAACP to disclose its membership lists violated the right of due process guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution as well as the rights of individual members to freely associate and assemble in the ongoing pursuit of their political agenda.
If corporations are people (like Harris Corproation, General Dynamics, Palantir Technologies, Berico Technologies and HBGary Federal are) the corporate “members” of CEWG (Energy Companies and their human proxys) are simply exercising those same freedoms of assembly and association with similar privacy protections.
Why would obtaining the names of CEWG’s members interfere with their free association?
It could create a chilling effect among CEWG members making them wary of having to public a role forced on them. A public role which might adversely impact their future careers creating anonymous dummy shell corporations to grease our political class for unspecified fossil fuel interests.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NAACP_v._Alabama
In an opinion delivered by Justice John Marshall Harlan II, the Supreme Court decided in favor of the petitioners (NAACP), holding that “Immunity from state scrutiny of petitioner’s membership lists is here so related to the right of petitioner’s members to pursue their lawful private interests privately and to associate freely with others in doing so as to come within the protection of the Fourteenth Amendment” and, further, that freedom to associate with organizations dedicated to the “advancement of beliefs and ideas” is an inseparable part of the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The action of the state’s obtaining the names of the Association’s membership would likely interfere with the free association of its members, so the state’s interest in obtaining the records was superseded by the constitutional rights of the petitioners.
Yes, thus my question. But why would it create a chilling effect?
Individual members of the NAACP can be harassed, threatened, lynched. In CEWG’s case … ?
I guess the answer must be reverse-engineered: What are they hiding?
This is the corporate shell game. Unlike real people who have babies, corporate persons can have children with the drafting of a document. Corporations can have octuplets in less than a day. In the same fashion, each well can be it’s own corporation. Each pipe can be its own corporation. Each valve can be its own corporation. That’s a lot of $5000 babies.
Hey, we have the best government money can buy. What’s not to like?
Are you kidding? You should be able to buy a MUCH better government than this bunch of clowns.
Not so. This government works great for those who are paying for it. The rich have never had it so good in human history.
And don’t forget that Wall Street is shoveling money to Hillary Clinton, knowing that she’s going to come in there and kick some butt and send them all to jail. The money has something to do with how she rushed into the burning, collapsing twin towers and pulled hundreds of people to safety, or something like that.
We’re a nation of secrets and lies.
It reminds me. I was going to put an ad on ebay or Craigslist for the the Supreme Court.
Up for auction is a recently vacated seat on the Supreme Court. Hand crafted with the finest Corinthian leather and known worldwide as the “Scalia Seat”, it carries Supreme provenance and commands respect even among America’s most elite oligarchs. Don’t miss out on this opportunity to own a part of American history.
Bidding starts at $100 million dollars.
That’s precious. I really hope you actually do this. Makes a hell of a statement!
what is this?
nice
Like every nefarious entity today, they work on behalf of TRUMP!
Smoke these planetary traitors out of their hiding places
Congress needs to know whether lobbyists have deep pockets – otherwise, how do they determine whether the legislation produced by the lobbyists is worth introducing on the House floor? So I’m sure CEWG tells the legislators who they represent.
So why not simply ask your elected representative? If they don’t know, they’re not exercising due diligence at lining their own nest, and don’t deserve your vote.
I believe legislation is now considered a positional good.
Due diligence requires the true value of legislation be identified.
They work for Saudi Arabia. I thought everyone knew!
Nice one, but just in case nobody’s mentioned it yet Sutherland is heavily involved and close biz ties to the Koch brothers, for example:
https://www.linkedin.com/title/senior-counsel,-trading
http://www.sutherland.com/Experience/185527/Achieved-a-favorable-pre-award-security-arbitration-decision-on-behalf-of-Koch-Shipping-Inc
Recommended Reading:
Listen, Liberal by Thomas Frank
Buyer’s Remorse by Bill Press
Dark Money by Jane Mayer
The Devil’s Chessboard by David Talbot
Wealth, Power, and the Crisis of Laissez Faire Capitalism by Donald Gibson