or not. I think this came up when they opposed climate change legislation as being "anti-business."
http://thinkprogress.org/2009/10/14/chamber-membership /
As Mother Jones reported yesterday, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce consistently says that its membership is 3 million, even though it’s actually closer to 200,000. The reason for the artificial inflation is that the organization is counting the memberships of 2,800 state and local chambers around the country, even though many of these businesses have no relationship with the national organization. Some of these members are now protesting the Chamber’s numbers game:
“They don’t represent me,” says Mark Jaffe, CEO of the Greater New York Chamber of Commerce, which is a dues-paying member of the national group. … Jaffe also scoffed at the US Chamber’s oft-repeated claim to “represent 3 million businesses of all sizes, sectors, and regions.” … “They are playing games” with their numbers, Jaffe said. “They don’t have half the businesses in America as registered, dues-paying members.”
– Jaffe’s objections to the US Chamber’s policies were echoed by Rob Black, vice-president of public policy for the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce. “We take a fundamentally different approach than the US Chamber,” he said, adding that while the national Chamber opposes the Waxman-Markey climate bill, “we support a market-driven cap-and-trade system.”
A day after this public scrutiny began, the Chamber is quietly backing down. At a press conference this morning, Chamber officials “repeatedly cited a membership of 300,000. That’s a tenth as many members as the Chamber claimed a day earlier.”
US Chamber Shrinks Membership 90%
http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2009/10/us-chamber-cave... Yo, Chamber of Commerce, You Speakin' For Me?
http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2009/10/yo-chamber-comm... And how about this one for being relevant to the current allegations about the C of C's foreign money. Curious, no? I wonder if anyone knew about this issue back when this came up:
U.S. Chamber of Commerce joins fight against Buy American
Source: Globe and Mail Update, Thursday, Jun. 11, 2009 03:24PM EDT
A major U.S. business group has joined Ottawa in pushing the Obama administration to loosen Buy American purchasing restrictions that have shut many Canadian companies out of lucrative U.S. contracts.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce said Thursday it will urge the U.S. Office of Management and Budget to give government agencies, states and cities greater freedom on where they buy products as the United States deploys billions in economic stimulus cash.
U.S. businesses and local governments are quickly waking up to the reality that Buy American restrictions are likely to cause them substantial harm, particularly if countries such as Canada retaliate with protectionism of their own, said Myron Brilliant, the chamber's senior vice-president of international.
“We could be at risk for billions of dollars and we're very concerned about those numbers,” Mr. Brilliant told reporters in Washington.
Read more:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-investor/us-chambe... /
Or how about this, their being a driving force behind right wing think tanks that blossomed along with PACs:
Lewis F. Powell
Thom Hartmann spent a bunch of time on this guy yesterday, and he should become well known among all who would get excessive Corporate influence OUT of everything that matters to this Country.
Introduction
In 1971, Lewis F. Powell, then a corporate lawyer and member of the boards of 11 corporations, wrote a memo to his friend Eugene Sydnor, Jr., the Director of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The memorandum was dated August 23, 1971, two months prior to Powell's nomination by President Nixon to the U.S. Supreme Court.
The Powell Memo did not become available to the public until long after his confirmation to the Court. It was leaked to Jack Anderson, a liberal syndicated columnist, who stirred interest in the document when he cited it as reason to doubt Powell's legal objectivity. Anderson cautioned that Powell "might use his position on the Supreme Court to put his ideas into practice...in behalf of business interests."
Though Powell's memo was not the sole influence, the Chamber and corporate activists took his advice to heart and began building a powerful array of institutions designed to shift public attitudes and beliefs over the course of years and decades. The memo influenced or inspired the creation of the Heritage Foundation, the Manhattan Institute, the Cato Institute, Citizens for a Sound Economy, Accuracy in Academe, and other powerful organizations. Their long-term focus began paying off handsomely in the 1980s, in coordination with the Reagan Administration's "hands-off business" philosophy.
Most notable about these institutions was their focus on education, shifting values, and movement-building - a focus we share, though usually with contrasting goals. One of our great frustrations is that "progressive" foundations and funders have failed to learn from the success of these corporate institutions and decline to fund the Democracy Movement that we and a number of similarly-focused organizations are attempting to build. Instead, they overwhelmingly focus on damage control, band-aids and short-term results which provide little hope of the systemic change we so desperately need to reverse the trend of growing corporate dominance.
more at link:
http://www.reclaimdemocracy.org/corporate_accountabilit...I know, I had better not get on any small planes after pasting this info here. There is more to demonstrate what a right wing tumor this organization has become. Remember Jaycees?
I cannot come here too frequently these days, as the demographic has shifted so radically that it is unrecognizable from the site it was when I first discovered it in 2001. Suffice to say, I had these tidbits cached in the robdogbucky archives, so I thought I would contribute here. I wonder what the Clown Car Contingent has to say about it?
Just my dos centavos
robdogbucky
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