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:
Under the screaming headline Obama's Katrina? with the equally screaming sub-title "The new president seems dangerously out of touch," the Wall Street Journal is running a story about...
A couple of parties in the East Room of the White House.
I could not make this shit up!
Since the presidency changed hands less than six weeks ago, a burst of entertaining has taken hold of the iconic, white-columned home of America's head of state. Much of it comes on Wednesdays.
The stately East Room, where portraits of George and Martha Washington adorn the walls, was transformed into a concert hall as President Barack Obama presented Stevie Wonder with the nation's highest award for pop music on Wednesday.
A week before that, the foot-stomping sounds of Sweet Honey in the Rock, a female a cappella group, filled the East Room for a Black History Month program first lady Michelle Obama held for nearly 200 sixth- and seventh-graders from around the city.
Cocktails were sipped during at least three such receptions to date, all held on Wednesdays.
We do not begrudge the president his fancy cocktail parties. Indeed, if anyone in the White House is reading this, please add us to the invitation list.
But there is a dissonance here that is rather hard to miss. The same president who last month lectured private-sector executives, "You can't get corporate jets, you can't go take a trip to Las Vegas or go down to the Super Bowl on the taxpayer's dime," is living large in the Executive Mansion that we taxpayers have generously provided him.
It's Hurricane Katrina all over again!
...but only in the psychotic fantasy-world of the Wall Street Journal.
On Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal editorial page fretted about the likely (hopefully inevitable - see our analysis at TMC.org) extension and expansion of SCHIP by Congress in the coming weeks. As was true of conservative criticism of the children's health program in late 2007 when President Bush twice vetoed the measure, the editorial page yelped that the new bill raises eligibility for the program to 300% of the federal poverty level. This means that a household of four making up to $66,150 is eligible for the program (the WSJ uses the wrong poverty measure to calculate its number). This income is, as the Journal laments, above the U.S. median household income ($50,233), revealing that:
The political purpose behind Schip has always been to capture the middle class.
But the Journal has the purpose - political or not - of SCHIP backwards. Health insurance - and health insurance for one's children - is part of what defines a middle-class standard of living, certainly more so than whether someone makes just above or just below $50,233. As employers drop health insurance coverage, as rising premiums make private insurance unaffordable, and as increasing unemployment swells the ranks of the uninsured, increases in the maximum income threshold for SCHIP coverage make sense to preserve the middle class and, in some cases, to help expand it.
Conservatives, along with the Journal editorial page, emphasize that SCHIP is a program "targeted at low-income families". This is both true and valuable to point out. Indeed, 8% of children from families between 200% and 399% of the federal poverty line are uninsured, while 20% of those below 100% of the poverty line are. But increasing the maximum income threshold beyond the "low-income" level demonstrates that any health care program is as much about a right (to health care) that is an important component of a middle-class standard of living as it is about making an expensive commodity available to the poor. To wit, by May of 2008, 43 states and D.C. had already made children of families at 200% of poverty or higher eligible for SCHIP.
This year's presidential campaign has not involved the "urban decline" rhetoric that rallied politicians - and policymakers - to the cause of cities in the mid 1960s and late 1970s. Instead, as Alex MacGillis pointed out in Sunday's WaPo, Senator Obama
"has adopted the framing increasingly favored by many mayors and urban-policy types - promoting America's cities based on their strengths, not their failings."
This framing involves a slight shift of perspective from urban cores to metro areas. In many ways, this optimistic view of cities as nestled within metros (which aren't as politically, or racially, charged as cities) is productive. Economics backs up the sunny view, as MacGillis notes, with the majority of the nation's GDP generated and of its population and jobs located in metro areas.
But the champions of the metro perspective fail to defend the political relationship - the partnership - that is necessary between the federal government and cities. In interviewing mayors from cities across the country, I have consistently heard that cities will not truly prosper until mayors are provided more substantive opportunities to influence federal policy. This influence would extend beyond calls for more funds for the CDBG and COPS programs to provide mayors and other parochial officials occasions to highlight model local policies and coordinate with state officers and, indeed, with other officials inside their metro area.
Mayors have already joined together in ad hoc groups to meet Kyoto Protocol targets and in official organizations like the Conference of Mayors, but they have little formal means to influence federal policy. If mayors are heard at all, they are heard to be begging for money; if they receive money, they often receive too little or are constrained in its use. Providing mayors a platform for influence, exchange, and coordination - similar to Senator Obama's White House Office of Urban Policy - would capitalize on the economic power of metro areas while restoring urban policy to its proper place in national discourse. At its best, this would mean strengthening the power and authority of mayors at the federal level--something that Obama's transition team should embrace.
In today's WSJ, June Kronholz points out that few mayors become president. They have often been overlooked when they should be empowered. Today, mayors nationwide overwhelmingly want the next presidential administration to reverse that trend.
A recent interview DMI's MayorTV did with Mayor Dannel Malloy of Stamford, CT explores the much-needed political partnership between cities and the federal government. Check it out.
Some days you just have a hard time dealing with politics.
The big story today is going to be Obama's presumptuous quote, which is of course clipped and highly misleading. Journalist Jonathan Weisman has a long history of doing this kind of smear of Democrats. Weisman's most famous quote is 'Fuck Brad Delong', something he wrote in an email after the economist Brad Delong wrote a critical piece about one of his articles on Bush's fiscal policy.
There's a piece in the Wall Street Journal today going after Kevin Martin, the Republican FCC Chairman who bravely took on the cable industry, which has started to filter the internet. It contains gem-like quotes such as the following.
By "majority" he means himself and the two Democrats on the five-member panel.
Yes, that is in fact a majority, even though it includes Democrats, the other major party in American politics. I'll have more on this hit piece soon.
This is why cable news is important, not because it has a big audience.
The Times's Jim Rutenberg reports that the McCain campaign's ads - the most recent one criticized Mr. Obama for canceling a visit with American troops in Germany - are getting viewed on local television across the country.
The result, Mr. Rutenberg writes, is "a public relations coup that allowed him to show his toughest campaign advertisement of the year - one widely panned as misleading - to millions of people, largely free, through television news media hungry for political news with arresting visual imagery."
It's not a bad thing that millions of people are told untruths, it's a coup!
According to the study, Mr. Obama has spent $27 million on advertisements since he effectively cinched the nomination in early June; Mr. McCain has spent $21 million since then. The Republican Party has chipped in another $3.6 million for ads during the same time period.
A curious exception: the study, based on data from the Campaign Media Analysis Group, a political advertising monitoring firm, shows Mr. McCain has yet to advertise in Florida, where Mr. Obama has spent $5 million on advertisements. Mr. Obama is also outspending Mr. McCain in Virginia, $2.7 million to $1.5 million.
Mr. Obama has pushed his advertising unchallenged into states that are generally considered so safely Republican that neither side traditionally bothers advertising in them during presidential campaigns, such as Alaska, Georgia and North Carolina.
