The article originally appeared on TomDispatch.com. In Beijing, they celebrate when they have a “blue sky day,” when, that is, the haze clears long enough so that you can actually see the sun. Many days, you can’t even make out the next block.
You can't bargain about global warming with chemistry and physics.
If the administration is serious about renewable energy, why won't it put solar panels on the roof of the White House?
Washington, by contrast, looks pretty clean: white marble monuments, broad, tree-lined avenues, the beautiful, green spread of the mall. But its inhabitants—at least those who vote in Congress—can’t see any more clearly than the smoke-shrouded residents of Beijing.
Their view, however, is obscured by a different kind of smog. Call it money pollution. The torrents of cash now pouring unchecked into our political system cloud judgment and obscure science. Money pollution matters as much as or more than the other kind of dirt. That money is the single biggest reason that, as the planet swelters through the warmest years in the history of civilization, we have yet to take any real action as a nation on global warming.
And if you had to pick a single “power plant” whose stack was spewing out the most smoke? No question about it, that would be the US Chamber of Commerce, whose headquarters are conveniently located directly across the street from the White House. On its webpage, the chamber brags that it’s the biggest lobby in Washington, “consistently leading the pack in lobbying expenditures.”
The group spent as much as $33 million trying to influence the midterm 2010 elections, and has announced that it will beat that in 2012. That, of course, is its right, especially now that the Supreme Court, in its Citizens United ruling, opened the floodgates for corporate speech (as in “money talks”).
But the chamber does what it does with a twist. It claims to represent “three million businesses of all sizes, sectors, and regions.” The organization, that is, seems to speak for a country full of barbers and florists, car dealers, restaurant owners, and insurance salesmen, not to mention the small entrepreneurs who make up local and state chambers of commerce across the country.
At least when it comes to energy and climate, though, that claim is, politely put, a fib. The Chamber of Commerce doesn’t have to say where it gets its money, but last year a group called U.S. ChamberWatch used one of the last disclosure laws still in existence to uncover a single pertinent fact. They went to the headquarters of the chamber and asked to see its IRS 990 form. It showed that 55 percent of its funding came from just sixteen companies, each of which gave more than a million dollars. It doesn’t have to say which companies, but by their deeds shall you know them.
The chamber has long opposed environmental standards. In the 1980s, it fought a ban on the dumping of hazardous waste. In the 1990s, it fought smog and soot standards. On climate change, though, it’s gone pretty near berserk.
In 2009, for instance, one of its officials even demanded a “twenty-first-century Scopes monkey trial” for global warming: “It would be the science of climate change on trial,” the chamber’s senior vice president for environment, technology, and regulatory affairs explained.
That didn’t go over so well. Several high-profile companies quit the chamber. Apple Computer, the very exemplar of the universe of cutting-edge technology, explained: “We would prefer that the chamber take a more progressive stance on this critical issue and play a constructive role in addressing the climate crisis.”
Other businesses complained that they hadn’t been consulted. Some, like Nike, quit the organization’s board. “We just weren’t clear in how decisions on climate and energy were being made,” said a Nike spokesman.
One thing was for sure: they weren’t being made by 3 million small businesses—because many local chambers of commerce started quitting the chamber as well. From Florida and South Carolina to Missouri and Kansas, from Colorado and Pennsylvania to New Hampshire and Washington, dozens of local chambers have announced that the US Chamber doesn’t speak for them on these issues. In Largo, Florida, for instance, the head of the local chamber explained that the US Chamber was composed, “for the most part, of political action committees and business lobbyists. They hold little resemblance to the local chambers of commerce that have been the cornerstone of their communities for generations.”
Faced with that kind of incipient rebellion, the chamber backtracked just a little, issuing a statement saying that they didn’t really want a global warming version of a monkey trial after all, and that climate change was an “important issue.” (The same statement went on to call for transforming the United States into the “Saudi Arabia of clean coal.”)
The happy talk in public, however, has done nothing to change the agenda the chamber pushes so powerfully in private. The same year as that statement, for instance, the organization petitioned the Environmental Protection Agency to take no action on global warming on the grounds that “populations can acclimatize to warmer climates via a range of range of behavioral, physiological, and technological adaptations.”
Now, read that again. No suggestion here that sixteen dinosaur companies adapt their business model to a reality that now includes melting ice caps, desertification and massive flooding, ever fiercer storms and acidifying oceans. Instead, they would prefer that every human being (and every other species) be so kind as to adapt their behavior and physiology to the needs of this tiny coterie of massive contributors. Forever.
What’s become clear is that the US Chamber of Commerce, an organization formed in 1912, more than a century after the first local chamber came into being, is anything but a benign umbrella for American small businesses. Quite the opposite: it’s a hard-edged ideological shop. It was Glenn Beck, after all, who said of the chamber that “they are us,” and urged his viewers to send them money. (Beck personally contributed $10,000 of the $32 million he earned in 2009.) The chamber’s chief lobbyist even called in to offer his personal thanks. It shouldn’t have come as a great surprise: Beck’s Fox News parent, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, had given its own million-dollar donation to the chamber.
Thanks to the Supreme Court and its Citizens United decision, there’s no way to keep the chamber and others from running their shadowy election-time campaigns. As long as monster companies are pumping money into their coffers, it’s “free speech” all the way and they’ll simply keep on with their dodgy operations.
Still, the rest of us can stand up and be counted. We can tell the Congressional representatives taking their money that they don’t speak for us. We can urge more big companies to act like Apple and Microsoft, which publicly denounced the chamber. (It’s good to hear Levi Strauss, General Electric, and Best Buy making similar noises.) We need to hear from more dissenting chambers of commerce. It cheered me to find that the CEO of the Greater New York Chamber said, “They don’t represent me,” or to discover that just a few weeks ago the Seattle chamber cut its ties.
But it’s even more important to hear from small businesspeople, the very contingent the US Chamber of Commerce draws on for its credibility. Across America in the coming months, volunteers from the climate change organization I helped to found, 350.org, will be fanning out to canvass local businesses—all those bakeries and beauty salons, colleges and chiropractors, pharmacies and fitness centers that belong to local chambers of commerce.
The volunteers will be asking for signatures on a statement announcing that “the US Chamber doesn’t speak for me,” and offering businesspeople the chance to post videos expressing just how differently they do think when it comes to global warming, energy and the environment. It’s a chance to emphasize that American business should be about nimbleness, creativity and adaptation—that it’s prepared to cope with changing circumstances, instead of using political cash to ensure that yesterday’s technologies remain on artificial life support.
It’s easy to guess how the US Chamber of Commerce will respond to this campaign. Last week, a series of leaks showed that their law firm had been carrying out extended negotiations with at least one “security firm” to collect intelligence on the chamber’s adversaries, including the group that uncovered the tax data showing where their money came from. Once the leak was made public, the chamber’s law firm cut off the negotiations, but not before they received “samples” of the kind of intelligence they presumably wanted—pictures of their opponents’ children, for instance, or the news that one foe attended a “Jewish church” near Washington.
For the record: I don’t like the chamber’s deceptions. I belong to the Methodist church in my hometown. Keep away from my daughter.
With my colleagues at 350.org, I’ll do what I can to help undermine the chamber's claim to represent American business. I don’t know if we can win this fight against money pollution, but we’re going to do what we can to clear the air.
If you like this article, consider making a donation.
Reprint this article. Click here for rights and information.
http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/23/the-little-people-pay-taxes/?emc=eta1
"populations can acclimatize to warmer climates via a range of range of behavioral, physiological, and technological adaptations."
The author makes a vital contribution to our discourse. This quote says that the US Chamber of Commerce believes that climate change is real. That is quite an admission from such an organisation, and a step forward in the debate. Organisations such as 350.org should take some pride in that achievement alone.
[Repost from a prematurely submerged Robert Scheer thread--yet, reasonably on topic vis-a-vis Obama's Presidential malfeasance.]
The "Time for Outrage" Was Years Ago, Actually
"Thankfully, events from Cairo to Wisconsin appear to be turning us in the right direction, finally. Now is the time to make the larger connections between momentous geopolitical events, and the absolute imperative to face down a culture of Corruption Gone Wild in Washington DC."
Thanks for posting this excellent food for thought article from Robert Scheer, Nation mag--so many thoughts, so little time.
First of all, as an avid fan of the work of Chris Hedges"”in particular, his spate of excellent books over the last ten years including, "War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning", and his latest gem, "Death of the Liberal Class", which, frankly, ought to be read by everyone who considers him or herself to be an American citizen"”I also have to agree with Robert that the larger point is probably being missed in Hedges' most recent Truthdig op-ed which levied some hot lava against Arianna Huffington's profitable sale of the Huffington Post. In defense of Hedges, it should be noted that some very fair criticism was leveled against some of the more prurient content and tactics of the HuffPo.
But here is where the rubber meets the road. What exactly are we attempting to achieve as a society? And how do we achieve a requisite level of honesty and integrity in a society that increasingly is ruled by "bottom line" considerations?
To that end, I strongly recommend the Tom Dispatch scorcher that The Nation is also featuring today by Bill McKibben, "The Chamber of Commerce Darkens the Skies".
In any case, Ms. Huffington was on point way back in that fateful summer of 2008 when she appeared on "This Week with George Stephanopoulos" and stated that progressives needed to apply pressure on Barack Obama immediately and forcefully"”this, in the wake of a string of deeply disturbing cave-ins by the Obama presidential campaign that occurred in the immediate aftermath of his having cinched the Democratic Party's nomination from Hillary Clinton in late May/ early June.
Here's an (lightly stylistically modified) excerpt of a post of mine from that time:
"In the blink of just one month, Barack Obama--with his unnecessary and callously calculated reversals on NAFTA, FISA, campaign finance reform, the Israel-Palestine impasse, ad nauseam--has essentially declared war on the very causes he has thus far pantomimed to protect.
At pain of stating the obvious, Barack Obama looks uncomfortably like the latest act at Sea World"”not much more than an impressive, attention absorbing Orca performing high flying tricks for his corporate paymasters"”to our dangerous distraction.
We've been duped, folks. Our mission must now be to resist the behavior that corporate masters have calculated we will exhibit. They've got us pegged with sophisticated statistical algorithms, and sealed in a prison of numerical calculations.
As right winger Hugh Hewitt said on Stephanopoulos"”same episode referenced above--'Progressives will ride the bus no matter how hard right it turns.'
Will we? Really?"
End excerpt.
Thankfully, events from Cairo to Wisconsin appear to be turning us in the right direction, finally. Now is the time to make the larger connections between momentous geopolitical events, and the absolute imperative to face down a culture of Corruption Gone Wild in Washington DC.
We need to hit the streets, or prepare to get rolled by the American right wing"”standard electoral politics are NOT going to solve the morass we've gotten ourselves into this time:
http://www.answercoalition.org/national/index.html
Saturday, March 19th is approaching at high speed. Get your signs and American flags ready.
Finally, one more excellent op-ed, this time from Ted Rall:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article27549.htm
Read Full Article »