By proposing financial reforms that won't curb Wall Street excess, U.S. policymakers have offered an unacceptably weak response to our enormous financial crisis. If voters don't demand that their elected representatives help workers and consumers instead of simply boosting corporate profits, the economic downturn will last for several more years and leave the economy vulnerable to another bank-induced meltdown.
The banks have unbelievable lobbying clout. In an interview with Cenk Uyger of The Young Turks, Heather Booth, executive director of Americans for Financial Reform, describes how one-sided the Wall Street reform fight has been. Despite broad public support for a fundamental financial overhaul, going up against the bank lobby is, as Booth describes, "a David and Goliath fight." It's basically Americans for Financial Reform against every major corporation in the U.S.
Booth notes that the Chamber of Commerce has vowed to spend $100 million on a campaign to defend the "so-called free enterprise system"-you know, the "free market"-in which corporate lobbyists spend millions of dollars to write the rules of the economic game. Just seven financial lobby groups have spent a massive $147 million peddling influence over the past two years.
In fact, as Janine Wedel observes for Salon, the U.S. economic system is starting to look an awful lot like the clannish systems of government that looted Eastern European countries in the early 1990s. Today, the public good takes a backseat to the narrow interests of powerful corporations.
With the Obama administration working with advisers from Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, we're not just watching Wall Street write its own regulations. We're watching the financial sector re-write the official role of the government in the economy. In this new role, the government's top priority is securing profits for corporate America.
"The intertwined coterie of financial and policy deciders in the United States is creating not only the financial architecture of the future, backed by the power and billions of the state, but, more generally, new relationships between the bureaucracy and the market," Wedel writes.
GRITtv's Laura Flanders echoes this theme in an interview with John Perkins, author of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, and journalist Russ Baker. Lobbyists have so thoroughly hijacked the U.S. economy, Perkins argues, that the nation's government now resembles those of Latin American nations he worked with in the 1980s and 1990s.
"I don't think the U.S. president has much power these days, to be honest with you. . . . It's the big corporate executives who call the shots today, and let's face it, they financed Obama's campaign," Perkins says.
The very efforts the government deployed to save the financial system are being perverted to create another disaster. In a five-part interview with Paul Jay of The Real News, Jane D'Arista, an influential economist and author of The Evolution of U.S. Finance, explains how Wall Street destroyed itself over the past decade. By borrowing massive amounts of money, Wall Street was able to place bigger bets in the capital markets casino, resulting in huge profits when those bets paid off. But when the bets backfired, the losses were just as massive. Companies couldn't pay them off, so the government stepped in to support them.
One of those support mechanisms came from the Federal Reserve, which began making incredibly cheap loans to firms that engaged predominantly in speculative trading. The Fed used to lend exclusively to commercial banks, which used the money to make loans that helped grow the real economy. But now those loans are being used to support risky securities trading, so we're seeing big profits in the financial sector, without much help for workers and consumers. This is a major long-term problem-if the economy can't keep pace with the Wall Street casino, those speculative trades are going to backfire and we'll be right back to the chaos of September 2008, only with an even weaker economy.
All hope is not lost. As Perkins and Baker emphasize in their interview with Flanders, citizens have to demand corporate accountability and a government that actually serves the public good. For much of the past decade in Latin America, governments have been elected that stood up to major corporations and demanded that they stop pillaging their nation's resources at the people's expense.
In addition to demanding much stronger reforms for the financial sector, we have to demand that the government respond seriously to problems facing workers. With the unemployment rate at 10.2% and expected to go still higher, we need jobs. As Steve Benen notes for The Washington Monthly, Obama's economic stimulus package helped stave off total economic devastation. What we need now is another stimulus to get people back to work, not just slow the pace of job losses.
"A bold, ambitious jobs bill can make a huge difference-the stimulus got us out of the ditch, a new effort can get us going in the right direction again," Benen writes.
And the only argument against this plan is that we "can't afford it." That is-the government's fiscal deficit is too high, and we just can't spend money to help people in real economic trouble.
But as Christopher Hayes writes for The Nation, the deficit excuse is pretty pathetic. Economic stimulus bolsters economic growth, thus improving tax returns for the government in the future. And any spending on any project can be taken out of the budget from other measures. Hayes notes that our massive military spending is almost never included in discussions about "fiscal responsibility." If we were really worried about how much it would cost to fix the economy, we could stop spending so much money killing people.
"Fiscal conservatism and deficit concern is nearly always code speak in Washington for something else," Hayes writes. "Most often, when someone in Washington says they're concerned about the deficit, what they're really saying is, 'I would like to make sure we have a government that focuses maximally on blowing people up.'"
The government has to start saying 'no' to corporate America. Corporate profits are not the same thing as a strong economy. We need to demand an economic policy that answers to workers, not just bank balance sheets.
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The U.S. Chamber Of Commerce's recent actions on two of the most important issues facing our country, healthcare reform and climate change, are a complete riddle to not only me, but to many of the chamber's own members and former supporters.
After several prominent members left the Chamber of Commerce over its prehistoric climate change policies, the organization appeared to do an about-face on its climate stance during a press conference on Monday. Sound too good to be true? It was. Members of the Yes Men, a group of satirical, anti-corporate activists, posed as Chamber of Commerce officials and held a fake press conference claiming that "There is only one sound way to do business: That's to support a strong climate-change bill quickly, so that this December in Copenhagen, President Obama can lead the entire business world in ensuring our long-term prosperity." In reality, the Chamber has not changed their climate stance and continues to oppose climate change legislation. The Yes Men's stunt is just one more in a chain of hoaxes this Autumn, including a boy in a balloon, death panels on health care reform, and recent allegations that radical Islamists are using interns to infiltrate Capitol Hill.
Pulling pranks on the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is just too easy. The Yes Men held a press conference this week pretending to speak for the chamber and fooled the journalists in the room, because "We are no longer going to promote the destruction of the earth's climate" is such a compelling position that it's very tempting to imagine that any human being could adopt it.
Stir Thoughts of Rightwing Economic Movement History
Last Tuesday evening, the Port of Los Angeles (POLA) Board of Commissioners met to consider approval of a waterfront development plan which has been the subject of public processes since at least January 2001. A conceptual plan was approved 5 years ago, on September 29, 2004, and the meeting for approval of the final environmental impact report (FEIR) was scheduled for September 29, 2009. The usual time lapse between concept and FEIR is 18 months, but the much longer time lapse was due to intense community opposition to Port staff's plans.
That, however, is not the point of this diary. Rather, as I sat in the seven-hour meeting (the vote wasn't taken till the early morning of the 30th) I was mildly amused to see one outside Chamber of Commerce after another-Wilmington, Long Beach, Los Angeles, along with several others-parade up to the podium and announce their enthusiastic support for the project, always careful to invoke the prospect of creating jobs. Bear in mind, this is a $1.2 billion project by a government agency. "What happened to their free market rhetoric,". I couldn't help but muse to myself. "It must have had the night off. Maybe went and saw a movie. Too bad that Capitalism, A Love Story hadn't opened yet."
But actually, there was nothing the least bit unusual about this. American business has been deeply dependent on government spending and support throughout all of our history. They only trot out that "free market" rhetoric when there's some battle to be fought against consumers, workers, or the environment. But when the battle is to fatten cash flows, the tune changes faster than any DJ could ever pull off.
Of course it doesn't hurt that the Port of LA is itself a member of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, as well as being a financial behemoth in the local San Pedro Chamber of Commerce. For although the POLA is a department of the city, it's a de facto independent business entity, overseen by mayoral appointees, but financed entirely separately and run by a staff that is virtually a law unto itself. Its primary loyalties are not the communities around it, or even to the city that it's formally a part of, but to its business clientele.
All of which lead me to think of how the Chamber of Commerce has been ideologically radicalized over the years, so that it routinely acts against the interests of its broad membership majority, and in the service of its wealthiest members, who can most easily and cynically deploy and retract their ideological rationale as needed. This in turn made me think of a book published early this year, Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan by Kim Phillips-Fein. I had originally tried to set up a conversation here at Open Left with the author, but distractions kept popping up, and I thought this little real-life reminder was something I should heed, and take the opportunity to present an excerpt from the first chapter of the book, where the Chamber of Commerce first makes its appearance. Excerpt on the flip:
Major utility corporations, like Exelon, California's Pacific Gas & Electric Co. (PG&E) and New Mexico's PNM have announced that they are leaving the U.S. Chamber of Commerce because of the organization's controversial stance toward climate change and opposition to a clean energy bill. The Chamber represents business interests, and according to a New York Times editorial, "no organization has done more to undermine [climate change] legislation."
This article from TIME on why greenwashing is so profitablecorporate social responsibility programs and the customers they attract included this unsurprising comment, "The only thing that has sunk lower than the public's opinion of Congress during this recession is its opinion of business."
Instead of seizing this moment when the public doesn't, perhaps, believe that what's good for corporations is good for America, Democrats have been busy campaigning to be the finance industry's new BFF while the rest of us struggle with debt, lose jobs, maybe lose homes. But politics abhors a vacuum. Enter ... Don Blankenship, CEO of Massey Energy and close, personal contributor to Sen. James winter-disproves-global-warming Inhofe!?
"Enviromental extremists and corporate America are both trying to destroy your job."
Listen to it three times, if you want to. It won't sound any less crazy.
Blankenship sits on the national board of directors for the US Chamber of Commerce*, no less. I guess if corporate America were coming for my job, he'd know. But why would he tell me about it?
Because his side's out of power, that's why. The playbook of both parties seems to be to campaign as a populist, govern as a corporatist. The Republicans and their closer allies have nothing to lose by stirring up the very real, and deserved, anger that corporations have raised through their misbehavior. Their side doesn't have to do anything about it and their authoritarian followers (pdf) will never hold it against them.
That's the Democratic leadership's big problem right now. If they were only the people they'd told us they were for the last decade, they could seize on this anger, this existential fear over basic needs in a bad economic situation, and channel it towards 'their' ends. Even if they were bad at it, they would try. But no. They must be so comically hypocritical, falling all over themselves to rake up the corporate money and be solicitous of our robbers' profits, that Don frakking Blankenship of Massey sodding Energy thinks he can plausibly sound like a man of the godsdamn people.
Heckuva job, Democrats.
* - Perhaps Blankenship will be relieved to know that Glenn Beck will set his compatriots in corporate America right when he keynotes the Michigan Chamber's Future Forum. One presumes Beck will warn them against their affiliations with environmentalists and others who might turn the US into Mexico.
The Chamber of Commerce is a right-wing hack group that essentially steals the branding of local small businesses they don't represent. Many local Chambers of Commerce aren't even affiliated with the national organization.
In the past, writing here on OpenLeft, I got the Chamber of Commerce to admit that they are now spending taxpayer bailout money to fund their right-wing issue-advocacy campaigns.
I've personally been told by old-school liberal institutions things like, "Oh, you can't attack the Chamber. Their branding is too strong." Umm, that's why you attack them. And today, my former MoveOn colleagues stepped up to the plate. An email from Anna Galland:
Less than 48 hours ago, the biggest corporations in the country declared war on President Obama's agenda. The scale of the attack is mind-boggling.
The right-wing lobbyists at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce will spend $100 million to defeat Obama's plans for health care and a clean energy economy. They call it their "most important project" in nearly 100 years.
Congress is voting on a crucial energy bill in less than two weeks, and you can count on a barrage of misleading TV ads and arm-twisting in Congress aimed at weakening the bill. We're countering with an emergency organizing drive to strengthen the energy bill—but we urgently need to raise the funds to power our organizing drive.
Can you chip in $45 to help fight back against the Chamber's campaign?
Your local Chamber of Commerce represents small businesses, but the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is different—it represents the interests of mega-corporations, especially Big Oil and Coal.
In the next ten days, we'll pull out all the stops to block the Chamber and strengthen the energy bill.
Huzzah! And a boding of future anti-Chamber activism is in the P.S. of the email.
P.S. If you're a member of your local Chamber of Commerce or run a small business, please sign our petition asking the U.S. Chamber to stop lobbying against Obama's clean energy jobs plan:
Knowing MoveOn, signing this petition is the first step in what will be a multi-step activism chain sticking it to the Chamber. If you are a local small business person, step up and sign!
I'd note: It should not require MoveOn to do this. The unions should have been doing this for years. The Clinton'ites should have done it back in their heyday. But now somebody is doing it -- and I, for one, am very supportive!
The Chamber took to their blog and ambiguously wrote, "No. No we are not."
It's well documented by Sam Stein at The Huffington Post that bailout recipients have been asked to funnel money to groups that are running anti-worker ads like the ones announced yesterday by the Chamber.
So I wrote, "Let me pose a more specific question: Is the Chamber actively rejecting money from bailout recipients?"
Another one quickly answered, the U.S. Chamber continues to accept as members companies which receive both public and private funds. In addition we do not believe that the receipt of taxpayer money abrogates an individual or groups’ rights under the First Amendment.
My original answer to the original question still stands, beyond question.
Actually, it's not beyond question -- and Jonathan Martin at Politico agrees:
Adam Green over at OpenLeft pushes the Chamber of Commerce to say that they're still accepting dues from bailed-out companies.
The goal is to make the case that the Chamber is using taxpayer dollars to help fund their anti-EFCA campaign (of which they have launched new ads targeting moderate Democratic senators).
The Chamber's Brad Peck says they're not using bail-out money for the campaign.
I've asked how exactly they know that to be the case.
A bunch of folks have joined the Facebook group asking the same question, and have used the contact info posted in that group to email Chamber execs directly.
The Chamber of Commerce’s solution for fixing our economic crisis is to use funds from taxpayer bailed-out companies to fight smart economic policies that will restore balance to our economy and help rebuild the American Middle Class.
...American taxpayers have had enough. The Chamber of Commerce must stop accepting taxpayer funds to lobby against taxpayer interests.
It's a pretty cut-and-dry case.
Taxpayer money went to companies so they could rebuild their fundamentals. By the Chamber's now-admission, bailout recipients are giving some of that money to the Chamber (aka, not using it to rebuild their fundamentals). Then, the Chamber uses that taxpayer money to fund ads against workers in political swing states.
We'll now see if the Chamber is as oblivious to the PR disaster that is about to hit them as the Wall Street execs who used bailout money to redecorate their offices and pay bonuses were.
Maybe smarter heads at the Chamber will prevail, and they'll take this issue off the table by publicly rejecting money from bailout recipients. We'll see...
This question was based on the fact that the Chamber just announced $1 million in new ads against the Employee Free Choice Act -- while bailout recipients like AIG and Bank of America are apparently being asked to funnel money to groups doing precisely this type of ad.
Is the Chamber of Commerce using bailout money to attack workers?
No. No we are not.
Let me pose a more specific question: Is the Chamber actively rejecting money from bailout recipients?
If yes, than Mr. Peck's answer holds true. If no, than Mr. Peck's answer seems quite questionable.
Oddly, the very month that Bank of America was asking Congress for a bailout, the Chamber of Congress put out this press release:
U.S. Chamber Announces 2008 Corporate Citizenship Awards Finalists...
Corporate Stewardship, Large Business Award, honoring overall values, strategies, and practices in companies with annual revenue greater than $5 billion—Bank of America, KPMG LLP, Pilot Travel Centers LLC, Siemens USA, and Verizon Communications
Really? Bank of America is the Chamber's model of corporate stewardship?
This puts the burden of proof squarely on the Chamber. Taxpayers deserve to know: As the Chamber runs millions in ads, it is activley rejecting money from bailout recipients?
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is launching a $1 million television advertising campaign that takes a new line of attack against the Employee Free Choice Act...The new Chamber ads will hit the airwaves in Nebraska, Virginia, Louisiana, North Dakota and Colorado -- states whose senators could be swing votes on the issue.
In January, The Huffington Post's Sam Stein broke this news:
Three days after receiving $25 billion in federal bailout funds, Bank of America Corp. hosted a conference call with conservative activists and business officials to organize opposition to the U.S. labor community's top legislative priority.
Participants on the October 17 call -- including at least one representative from another bailout recipient, AIG -- were urged to persuade their clients to send "large contributions" to groups working against the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), as well as to vulnerable Senate Republicans, who could help block passage of the bill.
There's a natural question for taxpayers to ask: Is the Chamber of Commerce using bailout money to attack workers?
There are two things you can do right now to take action:
It's getting ugly out there. Right-wing business lobby outfit National Association of Manufacturer's laid off 10% of their staff about a month ago, the Family Research Council axes a bunch of staffers post-election, and now I'm hearing rumors that the big Daddy of the right-wing, the US Chamber of Commerce, is going to engage in mass layoffs. This is reflective of the trade association world in general, which is preparing for an abysmal 2009 While we often concentrate on the decline of union membership versus unorganized or disorganized workers, I've never heard anyone try to quantify the amount of 'organized business' versus 'unorganized business'. Newer ascendant lobbying outfits, like the tech lobby, are still ideologically conservative, but you can tell they just don't have it in their hearts yet to truly crush everyone in their path and steal everything in sight.
Regardless, the budget of the right-wing is going to take a serious hit. That's going to have an impact on the culture of these outfits, who will become more risk averse. For instance, it is not a good year for these kinds of meaningless but irritating scandals to break out.
Roughly 100 employees of the [US Chamber of Commerce] ran up an $8,204 tab this week at The Exchange, a sports bar just blocks away from its prime real estate opposite the White House.
The party was to celebrate the end of the "Chamber Bowl," the association's internal softball tournament.
It was certainly not a victory for the Chamber's top brass.
Chamber COO David Chavern sent out an email chiding the partiers for their spending spree.
"Fundamentally, this shows a lack of responsibility on a number of people's part including Chamber personnel and management at The Exchange," Chavern wrote in an e-mail to more 50 employees, including softball players and top managers. "I will have to reevaluate a post-Chamber Bowl celebration next year."
Chavern detailed where the money went: One-hundred-and-fifty-five pitchers of beer, 37 bottles of beer, 208 mixed drinks, 111 shots, 43 margaritas and 11 open bottles of liquor.
Sources who attended the party described it as something akin to a Cancun booze cruise. They reported that drinkers ordered multiple pitchers of vodka and Red Bull and full bottles that they drunkenly left behind at the end of the night.
The Chamber, they said, had set no limits on the open bar.
The bill, attached to Chavern's e-mail, was reportedly several pages long.
Party-goers put some of the blame on the bar, saying that the waiters who served them had - among other things - slapped an 18 percent gratuity on the bill.
Member organizations do not like the prospect of trade association employees partying on their hard earned dime. Not in 2009, though to be fair, it was the bar's fault, since the bar forced them to tip their serving staff.
The US Chamber of Commerce launched this ad against the global warming legislation winding its way through Congress. It's hilarious, and dumb, and makes no sense. The scenario that consumers would have to jog to work is implausible, and doesn't really fear-monger the way that I would expect from a real right-wing campaign.
Therefore, along with other options, we are going to have to consider an increase in the federal gasoline user fee. This could take the form of a straightforward increase in a fee that hasn't been raised in 14 years or it may be in the form of a carbon tax designed to address global warming-as long as the proceeds are dedicated to transportation.
The US Chamber of Commerce has historically supported consumption taxes, and they would like nothing better than to raise energy costs on consumers and reduce them on their right-wing corporate members while dedicating the revenue to their interests.
But this ad isn't serious. It isn't intended to do anything except demonstrate to insiders that business is willing to spend lots of money to ensure that climate change legislation is tilted towards business interests.
The $54 million "pants lawsuit" brought against the Chung cleaners in D.C. by Roy Pearson is being turned into a right-wing cause. Their legal expenses are being underwritten by anti-consumer business lobbying groups like the Chamber of Commerce, and is part of an ongoing campaign by Republican-favored business interests to dismantle a strong Dem support base--trial lawyers.
