The revolt against the U.S. Chamber's stunning betrayal of Main Street America

[eridani]

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/10/09/1335401/-The-revolt-against-the-U-S-Chamber-s-stunning-betrayal-of-Main-Street-America

t's an idea that boggles the mind: America's largest, most powerful and best-known business organization siding AGAINST tens of thousands of its own members -- small- and mid-sized business owners in the U.S. heartland whose very survival is on the line. The only thing that could make that scenario involving the U.S. Chamber of Commerce even more staggering would be if the Chamber were doing this to aid a company that's not even based in the United States.

But that is exactly what is happening here in the Gulf Coast, where the U.S. Chamber, a lobbying Goliath, has sided with the London-based, pollution-spewing multinational corporation British Petroleum. BP is deperately pushing to reneg on its $8.7 billion-plus settlement with coastal businesses from Louisiana to Florida who were battered by the fallout from BP's reckless, 5-million barrel 2010 oil spill. Now, the Chamber's determination to side with international Big Oil against salt-of-the-earth American business owners is sparking an unprecedented revolt by the rank and file.

Gulf Coast chambers of commerce told the U.S. Supreme Court this week that their mothership, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, does not represent them in its support of BP PLC's challenge to the class action settlement stemming from the 2010Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

In an unusual public display of disagreement with the national chamber, the local affiliates, said:

"The Chamber did not seek the input nor approval of the amici affiliates, nor to our knowledge any Gulf Coast area affiliate, prior to filing its amicus brief in support of petitioner’s petition for a writ of certiorari."

[malaise]

1. Any organization that became powerful while promoting the sale of human beings

should long have been outlawed. The Chambers of Commerce of the planet were among the biggest promoters of the Atlantic slave trade.

[Lars39]

4. I had know idea of the Chambers' history!

Thank you for your comment, malaise!

[merrily]

9. I am not sure that malaise was being literal.

Business organizations, maybe, not something that we know today as the Chamber of Commerce, I

[Enthusiast]

5. Pluuuuuus one!

[JNelson6563]

2. I hope to see more division over this.

[Ron Green]

3. I have yet to see a Chamber of Commerce group of any size

take a position that rejects the extraction of value from local communities by corporate interests.

[Enthusiast]

6. +1

[RiverLover]

7. Thanks for posting, I had no idea this was happening down south.

I'm preaching to the choir here I know, but they shouldn't be allowed the name "US Chamber of Commerce". Its so misleading when they're a lobbyist group who has spent more promoting offshoring than any other group and they're funded by so many foreign companies. It shouldn't be legal.

And this BP/Chamber story of course hasn't been reported by MSM, because our "free press" is also bought & controlled by corporations. Nothing proves it more than their embarrassingly brief fleeting reporting if at all of the historic Climate Change March. grrrr

I hope this story gains traction too, maybe if enough local people protest. (Though that hasn't helped the case in Dayton Ohio with the police being exonerated for shooting & killing a Walmart shopper holding a plastic toy gun they had for sale. He happened to be black. There are protests going on...Maybe MSM can only handle one big racial injustice at a time. Or maybe Walmart is putting the pressure on to keep it out of the headlines....)

[merrily]

11. among many other things, the msm doesn't like to upset advertisers.

[Teamster Jeff]

8. If the Chamber of Commerce is a Union for Businesses - Which for all intents and purposes it is

This sounds like a decertification. Fuck them

[merrily]

10. The wiki of the Chamber contains some interesting facts.

...

The Chamber was created by President Taft as a counterbalance to the labor movement of the time.

........


In late 2011 it was revealed that the Chamber's computer system was breached from November 2009 to May 2010 by Chinese hackers. The purpose of the breach appeared to be gain information related to the Chamber's lobbying regarding Asian trade policy.[8]

Since a 1971 internal memo by Lewis Powell advocating a more active role in cases before United States Supreme Court, the Chamber has found increasing success in litigation. Under the Burger and Rehnquist Courts the Chamber was on the prevailing side 43% and 56% of the time, respectively, but under the Roberts Court, the Chamber's success rate rose to 68% as of 21 June 2012.[9]

......

The Chamber has emerged as the largest lobbying organization in America. The Chamber's lobbying expenditures in 2013 were almost twice as high as the next highest spender: National Assn of Realtors, at $38.5 million.

much, much more at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Chamber_of_Commerce

Interestingly enough, Taft also created the Department of Labor, allegedly reluctantly.

http://www.dol.gov/dol/aboutdol/history/dolhistoxford.htm

[starroute]

12. Things only really began to change in the late 90s

The US Chamber of Commerce had a new president in 1997, Tom Donohue, who adopted a policy of seeking large contributions from major corporations and injecting it into local judicial elections. This came in response to the tobacco lawsuits and a few other high-profile tort cases which made the corporations feel under assault.

At the same time, a Supreme Court decision had closed off political donations by foreign nationals, which led the GOP to seek new infusions of campaign cash.

Those two things soon converged, with the Chamber, the corporations, and party politics all working together to remake the judiciary in particular, and US politics in general, in more business-friendly, anti-consumer terms.

If anyone recalls when Anonymous came up with a trove of hacked documents from the security firm HBGary, one of the things revealed was Chamber plans to retaliate against anybody who'd been going after them.

The local Chamber affiliates and small businesses had noticed by a decade ago that their own interests were no longer being well served -- but sometimes it takes a case like this to bring matters to a head.