Defections Expose Chamber's Dirty Little Secrets

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/10/15/AR2009101504000.html

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.

--snip--

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.

--snip--

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.

:applause: :applause: :applause: :applause:

They have pretty much the same agenda.

Lost a mouthful of coffee reading that.