Chamber Pot of Commerce

by Tula Connell, Oct 16, 2009

Some chamber pots need a lot of cleaning.

The day after Barack Obama was elected president, we at the AFL-CIO in Washington, D.C., draped the front of our building with a massive banner: “We’re Turning Around America.” In January, we added another banner supporting passage of the Employee Free Choice Act.

The AFL-CIO building is just around the corner from the Chamber of Commerce. So apparently after stewing lo these many months, the Chamber decided to drape itself in its own banner, imitation being the sincerest form of flattery.

The banner proclaims the ludicrous—yet at an estimated $100 million, massively funded—campaign the Chamber announced yesterday to shore up free enterprise and create jobs. Or, as Politics Daily puts it:

Chamber of Commerce Relaunches Capitalism.

Chamber President Tom Donohue, who last week was battling Apple Inc. and other corporations about their decisions to leave the Chamber over its antediluvian climate change stance, had this to say about the campaign:

The free enterprise system, which has done so much for so many, is facing great challenges.

Indeed. Here are a few of those challenges:

• Major U.S. banks and securities firms are on pace to pay their employees $140 billion this year—a record high….Even as 26 million U.S workers are unemployed or underemployed.
• Taxpayers saved the American International Group-and now it plans to dole out $198 million in bonuses to employees of its trading unit, where problems posed a threat to the global financial system last year.
• Meanwhile, total weekly pay for production workers (80 percent of the workforce) has fallen for nine consecutive months, an unprecedented string over the 44 years the Bureau of Labor Statistics has calculated weekly pay. The old record was a two-month decline, during the 1981-1982 recession.
• A total of 937,840 homes received a default or auction notice or were repossessed by banks between June and September, a 23 percent increase from a year earlier. Yet large financial institutions continue to engage inthe same risky lending practices that led to the near collapse of the financial system, beginning with the mortgage crisis in September 2008.

So what’s the Chamber’s solution?

• Spend millions of dollars to kill the proposed Consumer Financial Protection Agency that would be consumers’ frontline against predatory loans and usurious credit card interest rates.
• Fight to kill legislation extending unemployment insurance for the millions of jobless workers whose search for work has been futile in an economy where there are more than six workers for every one job.
• Pretend to have a campaign about job creation to cover up who’s side it’s really on: Wall Street.

No less a mainstream outlet than the Washington Post blasted the Chamber pot of big bucks the organization is spending to convince most Americans of the value of “individual initiative, hard work, freedom of choice and free exchange of trade, capital and ideas.”

What we’ve also learned this week is how disingenuous the Chamber has become in its Washington lobbying. To hear it from Donohue and his minions, it’s not that the business community opposes financial regulation, or universal health care or controlling greenhouse gases—it’s just opposed to every credible idea for doing something about them. And rather than focus on working constructively to improve legislation, the Chamber’s default strategy is to try to kill it outright through exaggeration, misrepresentation and outright lies.

Discussing the Chamber’s fleeing members, Marc Ambinder also sums up the overall outlook for the Chamber:

It’s becoming harder for the Chamber to mount the sort of astroturf campaigns that’ve been so effective before.

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