How the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Became the Greatest (Bumbling) Enemy of America. [View all]

[HughBeaumont]

The Politely Evil Empire: How the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Became the Greatest (Bumbling) Enemy of America

http://www.miaminewtimes.com/2014-01-30/news/us-chamber-of-commerce-problems/full/

Think of the U.S. Chamber as your crazy Uncle Ed. He spent too much time listening to talk radio, developed a raging victim complex, and came to believe the country was being destroyed by sloth and moochery. So he formed a lobbying group to defend the one true antidote: free enterprise.

The national organization was founded in 1912 to bring a greater business voice to Washington. It was always conservative. It was against America's rush to stop Hitler in World War II. It called Franklin Roosevelt's remedies for the Great Depression, among them social security, an attempt to "Sovietize" America. After the war, it cheered on Joe McCarthy's hunt for imaginary Commies.

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The group's guiding principle: If it might help regular people, the Chamber considers it heresy. Free enterprise should be absolutely free, this logic goes, even if it turns the country into Rwanda with nicer Burger Kings. Anything less is an outrage.

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Soon the U.S. Chamber began sounding less like the apostle of free markets and more like the official welfare agency of the golden-parachute set. Donohue called for drastic cuts to social programs. But he also wanted taxpayers to bail out BP after its Gulf spill, defended the oil industry's $12 billion annual welfare package, and was outworked by no one in protecting Wall Street banks from too-big-to-fail laws.

"The Chamber isn't really anti-government," says Damon Silvers, policy director of the AFL-CIO, a federation of some of the nation's largest unions. "They just want the government to be subordinate to big business."

Great article, easy to read. Local CoCs are leaving the extremist RW CoC in droves. It's become a disease, one that affects this nation's progress.