Why the Chamber of Commerce Has Been Wrong on All the Issues -- For 99 Years and Counting

http://www.alternet.org/environment/150341/why_the_chamber_of_commerce_has_been_wrong_on_all_the_issues_--_for_99_years_and_counting?utm_source=feedblitz&utm_medium=FeedBlitzRss&utm_campaign=alternet

March 22, 2011 |

What if I told you I'd found a political group that for a hundred years had managed to be absolutely right on every crucial political issue? A political lodestone, reliably pointing toward true policy north at every moment.

Sorry. But I have something almost as good: a group that manages to always get it wrong. The ultimate pie-in-the-face brigade, the gang that couldn't lobby straight.

From the outside, you'd think the US Chamber of Commerce must know what it's doing. It's got a huge building right next to the White House. It spends more money on political campaigning than the Republican and Democratic National Committees combined. It spends more money on lobbying that the next five biggest lobbyists combined. And yet it has an unbroken record of error stretching back almost to its founding.

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As Brad Johnson, at the Center for American Progress, has detailed recently, the US Chamber has opposed virtually every attempt to rein in pollution, from stronger smog standards to a ban on the dumping of hazardous waste. (They're hard at work as well trying to relax restrictions on US corporations bribing foreign governments, not to mention opposing the Lily Leadbetter Fair Pay Act). If there's a modern equivalent of World War II, of course, it's the fight against global warming. Again a majority of Americans want firm action, because they understand the planet has never faced a bigger challenge--but that action's been completely blocked in Washington, and the US Chamber is a major reason why. They've lobbied against every effort to cut carbon, going so far as to insist that the EPA should stay out of the fight because, if the planet warmed, "populations can acclimatize via a range of range of behavioral, physiological, and technological adaptations." That is to say, don't ask a handful of coal companies to adapt their business plans, ask all species everywhere to adapt their physiologies. Grow gills, I guess.

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http://climateprogress.org/2011/02/03/chamber-of-commerce-against-clean-energy/

1999: Chamber of Commerce opposes reinstating Superfund taxes on toxic polluters.

1997: Chamber of Commerce fights stronger smog and soot standards.

1993: Chamber of Commerce opposes trade sanctions in NAFTA for failure to enforce environmental laws.

1992: Chamber of Commerce opposes binding global warming treaty.

1990: Chamber of Commerce attacks Clean Air Act revision.

1984: Chamber of Commerce opposes hazardous waste dumping ban.

1982: Chamber of Commerce petitions to weaken Clean Air Act

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