All of these announcements and breakthroughs would, of course, line up with the overwhelming majority understanding in the United States. It would be easy to believe that the chamber meant them. But these are all announcements that only the Yes Men or other pranksters would make.
I'm working with a coalition of groups at http://stopthechamber.org and have been reading up on just how crazy and just how massive this chamber is. It's not your local or state chamber of commerce. Those are not chapters of a national entity, and they often oppose what it is doing. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is a major force for the rightwingiest right-wing positions. It buys ads, it makes campaign "contributions", it lobbies, it sues, it presents court arguments, it runs a "think tank", it funds front groups that attack political candidates, and it brags about how much money it spends on activities it never reports to the government as legally required.
The chamber promoted financial deregulation and is now pouring tens of millions of dollars into a campaign to oppose any regulation. The chamber claims, absurdly, that its purpose is to create jobs. How does one parody that? Only be falsely announcing the opposite. There's no other way it can be done. Imposing stiffer regulations on Wall Street is backed by over three-quarters of Americans, at least prior to the chamber's new ad campaign.
I used to work with ACORN on local living wage and minimum wage campaigns, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce was our most powerful adversary, swooping in and taking us to court after we passed higher standards through public votes. Why was New Orleans so poor and ill-equipped when Hurricane Katrina hit? One reason is that the chamber led a successful effort to overturn a minimum wage law that we had put in place. The chamber has run ads against the Employee Free Choice Act claiming to be speaking in defense of workers.
The chamber supports the idea that corporations are persons with human and civil rights, as well as the idea that spending money on political candidates (which we used to call bribery) is a free-speech right, even for corporations. The chamber has submitted a lengthy amicus brief in the case of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission arguing against restrictions on corporate election spending on the grounds that this would infringe on corporate free speech and that the single greatest victim of this infringement would be the Chamber of Commerce itself, which -- in the brief, as on its website -- falsely claims to have three million companies as members. In contrast, the American Independent Business Alliance has submitted a brief arguing the opposite view and considers the chamber's position dangerous to businesses other than Wal-Mart and Goldman Sachs. The AIBA denounces the chamber as favoring the purchase of political favors over engagement in actual competitive enterprise.
As revealed by Mother Jones magazine this week, the chamber actually has 200,000 to 300,000 members, and falling. Companies that have pulled out of the chamber in protest of its promotion of climate destruction include: Apple, Exelon Energy, Pacific Gas and Electric, and the Public Service Co. of New Mexico. Even Nike has dropped its Board of Directors position while maintaining its membership. Even General Electric says that the chamber does not speak for it on climate issues, while maintaining its membership. When GE has to distance itself from you on the environment, you know something's wrong. And companies like Wal-Mart, Target, and Kelly Services Inc. have objected to the chamber's opposition to healthcare.
Who's running this national train wreck? Tom Donohue, former CEO of the American Trucking Associations, currently serving on the board of directors of Union Pacific Corporation, a railroad company that hauls a lot of coal and has given Donohue over $1.3 million in pay plus over $3.8 million in shares, and another $700,000 to the chamber.
What can we do to raise our voices in Washington, D.C., and help lower the decibel level of the chamber's screams? Start here: http://stopthechamber.org
David Swanson is the author of the new book "Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union" by Seven Stories Press. You can order it and find out when tour will be in your town: http://davidswanson.org/book.
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