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 Posted: Thu Nov 05, 2009 4:01 pm |
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free market fanaticism is starting to crumble:the country is now mired
in the worst recession in 75 years after a decade in which government
pursued a rabidly free-market agenda:Defections Expose Chamber's Dirty
Little Secrets
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/10/15/AR2009101504000.html
Defections Expose Chamber's Dirty Little Secrets
By Steven Pearlstein
Friday, October 16, 2009
It's been a lousy week for Tom Donohue and his pals over at the U.S.
Chamber of Commerce.
For months now, Tom has been crisscrossing the country looking for
corporate donations with which to launch a campaign to "remind,
educate and persuade" Americans that the free enterprise system is
what has made America great and is what will once again "lead us back
to prosperity."
Normally, it wouldn't take a $100 million propaganda effort to
convince most Americans of the value of "individual initiative, hard
work, freedom of choice and free exchange of trade, capital and
ideas." But inasmuch as the country is now mired in the worst
recession in 75 years after a decade in which the government pursued
the rabidly free-market agenda espoused by the Chamber, you can
appreciate Tom's problem.
The Campaign for Free Enterprise, of course, is not really about
creating 20 million jobs over the next decade -- if Chamber members
could double their profits while creating not a single new job, that
would suit them just fine. Rather, it's nothing more than a desperate
attempt to repackage the same old anti-tax, anti-regulation, anti-
government rhetoric in hopes of derailing the major initiatives of the
Obama administration and the Democratic Congress.
Unfortunately for Tom, the world is finally catching on to his game.
In the past few weeks, a number of big-name companies -- including
Apple, Nike and PG&E -- have resigned from the Chamber or its various
boards and committees over its continued opposition to doing anything
about global warming. Donohue and his minions tried to brush off the
corporate defections as nothing more than a PR stunt orchestrated by
environmental activists that would have little impact on an
organization with 3 million members. But in the process, the
controversy managed to expose three embarrassing truths about the
Chamber.
The first truth is that the Chamber, in fact, does not represent
anything close to the 3 million businesses it has always claimed. In
response to an inquiry from Mother Jones, the chamber acknowledged
that its actual paid membership is only 300,000, including several
thousand local chambers of commerce whose own membership was used in
calculating the inflated 3 million figure. Moreover, when Josh
Harkinson of Mother Jones contacted some of those local chambers,
their leaders took pains to distance themselves from the national
organization, whose policies, they said, they had no hand in shaping
and with which they frequently disagree.
"They don't represent me," said Mark Jaffe, chief executive of the
Greater New York Chamber.
Indeed, the second dirty little secret that was revealed by the
defections is how undemocratic the Chamber has become. Among lobbyists
in Washington, the Chamber is known as a staff-driven organization,
which should hardly be a surprise given the wide range of businesses
that belong to it. And with a board of directors that is self-
appointed and has an unwieldy 120 members, it should be no surprise
that Donohue and his top staff really call the shots. While the
Chamber likes to point to its network of policy committees that
supposedly advise the board, the panels tend to be dominated by those
members with special interests to protect. Recorded votes are rare,
and presentations are heavily skewed toward experts who agree with the
positions staked out by Donohue's lobbyists, who over the past 15
years tightly allied themselves with the Bush White House and the
Republican leadership on Capitol Hill.
Moreover, much of the Chamber's public policy effort these days is now
funneled through a network of independent entities that it has
sponsored to work on specific issues. These arrangements allow the
Chamber to raise large sums from businesses that may not want to be
publicly identified with hardball tactics like filing lawsuits or
running negative ads. The entities have the advantage of not being
subject to limits on corporate political contributions, nor do they
have to disclose where they get their money or how they spend it.
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.
In the hands of the Chamber's propagandists, a rather straightforward
effort to halt abuses by mortgage brokers and credit card lenders is
being transformed into a regulatory power-grab that will ensnare
butchers and bakers and candlestick makers.
A tax on gold-plated health plans that will generate the money needed
to provide health insurance subsidies to low-wage workers is turned
into a huge income tax on small-business owners that will snuff out
job creation.
And a proposal for a cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions
suddenly is dismissed as an economy-crushing tax increase that will
send all manufacturing over to China.
Earlier this month, I went to one of those off-the-record dinners you
might have heard about, where the chief executive of a big and well-
known corporation was bemoaning the inability of government to deal
with big problems like huge deficits, global warming and the failure
to turn out more college graduates and PhDs in science.
When it came my turn to respond, I asked why he continued to pay dues
to business associations that for much of the last 15 years had set
out to deliberately undermine the public's confidence in government
and starve the tax revenues. I never got an answer.
Steven Pearlstein can be reached at pearlsteins at (no spam) washpost.com. |
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