The US Chamber of Commerce is in the news again this week, this time for backing controversial conservative democrat Blanche Lincoln, who according to an article in the NY Times this week “is facing a tough primary challenge from the left, in the person of Lt. Governor Bill Halter.”
The Chamber has been quite unpopular with Democrats this year, as she tried to block the clean air act last fall, according to an article in the Huffington Post, “Senator Lincoln’s constituents ought to ask her why she wants to help Big Oil and out-of-state coal companies to the detriment of the clean energy businesses and natural gas industry that are actually creating jobs in her home state,” President of the Sierra Club Carl Pope said in a press release” last fall. Their stance against the environment resulted in Apple and several other large corporations resigning from the Chamber in protest, according to a Times article last November.
Thomas J. Donohue, President of the Chamber is well known for his arrogance and conservative politics. “As president of the nation’s largest and oldest business association, Mr. Donohue is no stranger to sharp policy debates. During his 12-year tenure, the chamber has been outspoken on trade, tort reform, union organizing rights, financial regulation and health care. Mr. Donohue has hired an army of lobbyists and has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on advertising, advocacy and political campaigns to make sure its voice is heard. The chamber represents its generally conservative membership of 300,000 companies and local business groups on these issues without much public protest.
But climate change poses a different sort of challenge for Mr. Donohue. According to the Times article, “Many of the chamber’s big-business members are deeply split on the issue, with some standing to profit from an economy moving away from reliance on fossil fuels, while others could see devastating increases in costs.”
In spring of this year, they also picked up the campaign to try to stop the health care bill, as reported in the You’re The Boss blog: “We know that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce will spend millions on advertising to try to stop the Democrats’ final push on health care — $10 million in the last two weeks ago or so, according to our colleague Jeff Zeleny. But this week, the organization that calls itself the largest small business lobby deployed another, more subtle weapon from its arsenal: the poll.” According to the post, their poll failed to adhere to the standards set by polling organizations, but that didn’t stop the Chamber from endorsing it’s findings.
Is the Chamber working to help our businesses or just trying to promote conservative politics?
Susan Martin, Business Sanity
