The Business of America is Dirty Tricks

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Meet the United States Chamber of Commerce

LEE FANG


Any glance at the inert state of political progress in our market-addled age has to leave even the most dogged investigator a bit bewildered. We live, after all, in an era of economic and ideological drift—of street occupations and ballot-box insurgencies. Yet our institutions of national government remain in shameful fealty to a laissez-faire fantasy. With metronomic predictability, the wise men of Washington preach austerity amid a raging jobs recession and wish away the bulwarks of economic security that make life in these United States (barely) tolerable for fixed-income retirees and poor people who have had the unpardonable bad taste to fall ill. As major manufacturing metropolises go bankrupt, as wages continue to go south while productivity climbs, as mortgages and pension plans are pillaged by the bailed-out banking class, we are trapped in a political consensus that urges government continually to shrink and depicts tax increases on the rich as an unholy abomination against the market’s righteous will. Why, for God’s sake?


One answer comes from a place that few Americans spend much time thinking about: the stodgy and terminally respectable U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a lobbying group best known for its civic booster speeches and “young entrepreneur” scholarships.
What has the U.S. Chamber of Commerce done to advance the undoing of the American middle-class dream? One might ask, far more efficiently, what the Chamber hasn’t done along these lines. The group, which commands an annual budget of more than $200 million covering six legal sub-entities, has proven a diehard foe of federal health care reform, global warming legislation, rational tax policy, and virtually any piece of legislation not designed to feather the nest of a plutocrat. And thanks to its little-noted recent makeover as a corporate sluicegate for soft-money campaign contributions, this formerly milquetoast business lobby is probably the main reason that the Tea Party will hold domestic policymaking in a functional state of suspended animation for the foreseeable future.

At the moment, the D.C. media claims the Chamber is “at war” with the far-right fringe of the Republican establishment. The government shutdown, the conventional wisdom goes, split the business community from Tea Party leaders. Yet a closer examination of the record shows that little has changed; the right wing of the GOP still benefits from the Chamber’s largesse. In March the Chamber presented awards to dozens of lawmakers for championing the “Spirit of Enterprise.” The awardees included many leaders of the hostage-taking last fall. And true to form, while pledging to reporters that they would oppose the proponents of the shutdown in their election campaigns, the Chamber has already aired campaign advertisements in favor of GOP congressmen who voted to shutter the federal government.

The Koch brothers may get most of the credit for funding the antigovernment right, but the Chamber funded a large number of the campaigns that stamped the U.S. House of Representatives as an unofficial franchise of the Tea Party. And the Chamber’s strategists didn’t much care which campaign finance laws they had to sidestep in the process. So let’s give them their due.

http://www.thebaffler.com/salvos/the-business-of-america-is-dirty-tricks



This is a must-read. Lee Fang's article covers everything from the Powell Memo to the Red Scare (which originated with the Chamber not McCarthy) to their most recent effort ,Team Themis. Team Themis was the Chamber's attempt to undermine and target unions, journalists, liberal activists and other groups in conjunction with cyber-security companies. Fang also documents the infiltration of foreign money into our elections , all thanks to the Chamber.

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