The Chamber of Commerce’s Jobs Deception Campaign

by Richard L. Trumka, Oct 15, 2009

Unions are popularly known as “the folks who brought you the weekend.” In contrast, the Chamber of Commerce schemes to take away employees’ weekend—along with overtime pay, the minimum wage, Buy America rules, employee’ freedom to form unions, child labor standard protections….The list is long and ugly.

So it’s farcical that today the Chamber launched a campaign estimated to run in the tens of millions of dollars to promote job creation.

The Chamber’s campaign originally started out as an attack against financial regulation—until the Chamber found out how strongly U.S. taxpayers support reining in Big Banks and the financial industry’s widespread shady practices. So the Chamber changed the packaging to purportedly focus on jobs, which in fact the American people desperately need.

Look at who accompanied the Chamber suits while they were announcing their Orweillian-named “free enterprise campaign.” As Sam Stein reported here:

Many of the individuals featured on Wednesday are long-standing donors to Republican candidates and groups that have fought efforts to enhance regulation. And, in one case, the business leader appearing alongside [Thomas] Donohue to decry the interference of government in the market place received business through the benefit of government contracts.

Yet, while millions of America’s workers struggle to find jobs in an economy where there are more than six workers searching for every one job, the Chamber repeatedly opposed extending unemployment insurance. Can’t have government interference in the marketplace, after all. Or aid to jobless workers. The same workers the Chamber’s smoke-and-mirrors campaign is supposed to be all about.

The Chamber also is joining with Big Banks and financial conglomerates to try and kill a proposed agency that would protect U.S. consumers from being preyed upon by unscrupulous banks, mortgage lenders and many of the same financial institutions that helped cause our nation’s economic disaster. The Obama administration’s proposed U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Agency, which this week is being considered in the House Financial Services Committee, would regulate products such as credit cards and home loans, while ensuring the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission oversaw the $450 trillion “derivatives” market that sunk the world economy.

The Chamber is spending $2 million in attack ads, falsely claiming that the new agency would hamstring even your local butcher from extending you credit for a week. It’s the same evil effort at deception and outright lies that the health insurance industry now is trying to pull in the debate over health care reform. The Chamber’s scheme is to tell enough lies and hope someone believes you.

As President Obama said in response to the Chamber’s distortion:

We’ve made clear that only businesses that offer financial services would be affected by this agency. I don’t know how many of your butchers are offering financial services,” Obama said to laughter.

The Chamber is so twisted up in deception it seems unable to even provide accurate membership numbers. Writing in Mother Jones this week, David Corn points to a big discrepancy between the Chamber’s fake membership numbers and reality.

In testimony before Congress, statements to the press, and on its website, the Chamber falsely claims to represent “3 million businesses of all sizes, sectors, and regions.” In reality, the number is probably closer to 200,000.

Not sure if the 200,000 includes Apple Inc., Pacific Gas & Electric and the other giant corporations that recently have pulled out and dumped their membership from the Chamber because of its draconian anti-environment stand on climate change.

The Chamber’s so-called “free enterprise” scheme has been tried before. After World War II, the National Association of Manufacturers led a similar such effort. That campaign to sell capitalism to U.S. consumers incurred the derision of no less than the editors of Fortune magazine, who found similar sentiments among business executives represented on the boards of the business associations that supposedly represented them.

In dismissing the scheme as ludicrous, one such executive described it this way:

The best way we can demonstrate the importance of Free Enterprise is to make it work.

It’s clearly not working now. And although the Chamber is trying to deceitfully wrap itself in the shiny trappings of a fake feel-good campaign, its repeated attacks on consumers employees and workers demonstrate who the Chamber really stands for: Wall Street greed and corruption, not Main Street.

This is a cross-post from the Huffington Post.

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