The U.S. Chamber Doesn't Speak For Me

This morning, the US Chamber of Commerce released its latest attempt to strip away the rights of citizens and promote the interests of wealthy polluters.

The Chamber’s latest hack-job is the report and website, “Project No Project.” (Is it just me, or does this sound like an indyrock group’s latest album?) The report is a clever attempt to ease the permitting process for dirty energy projects by arguing that even clean energy is held up by pesky local citizen groups and environmentalists.

The report launched with an oped in the USA Today by Chamber president Tom Donahue. Rather than talk about the dozens of nuclear, coal, and gas projects that are being rightfully delayed over environmental and health concerns, Donahue argues his case for weakening regulations by cherry-picking a few examples where renewable energy projects are being delayed.

“Lawmakers and the American public must recognize that our broken permitting process and extreme groups are denying projects across the country the opportunity to be fairly considered on their merits.”

The lady doth protest too much, me thinks. Extreme groups? The US Chamber is the largest special interest lobby group in Washington. In 2009 it spent five times as much on lobbying as the next highest spender: Exxon Mobil. According to documents leaked this February, the Chamber was recently in negotiations with private security firms to take down their opponents. 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.

The “extreme groups” that the Chamber attacks in the Project No Project report range from local citizen groups, to the NAACP, to the Sierra Club. In his oped, Tom Donahue asserts that the concerns brought by these groups are petty squabbles over views and property values. A quick look at the Chamber’s own report, however, reveal that the concerns are more often than not about air pollution, improper environmental impact assessments, and rushed permitting processes.

Donahue writes, “The simple truth is that it takes too long to build almost anything in our country today — even clean, green, and renewable energy resources that create jobs, enhance our energy security, and improve our environment.”

In this case, we agree: it is taking far too long to build a clean energy economy in America. But it’s not local groups that are holding up the process. It’s the US Chamber of Commerce and the tens of millions of dollars they’ve spent lobbying on behalf of wealthy polluters.

Here’s the letter that just went out to our 350.org USA list. Not getting our emails? Sign up here.

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Dear Friends,

People have been asking me: of all the potential targets on the planet, why is 350.org taking on the US Chamber of Commerce?

Simply put, the US Chamber is one of the biggest barriers to climate progress in the entire world.

In the last year for which statistics are available, the US Chamber spent five times as much money lobbying as the next highest spender — Exxon Mobil. They spent more money on political campaigning than the Republican and Democratic national committees. And they used all that corporate cash to make sure that the planet kept warming, opposing almost every measure that might have made even a small difference. Not to worry, they told the EPA: when the earth warmed, humans could “adapt their physiologies.”

That’s why we’re taking them on. And if you think that they’re too powerful to hurt, you’re both right and wrong. We can’t take away their money — the Supreme Court has seen to that with the Citizens United decision — but we can neutralize their other major source of power, the claim that they “represent American business.” They don’t: most American businesses aren’t like the handful of giant corporations that provide most of the Chamber’s funds. We should be clear: the US Chamber isn’t a government agency, it’s a privately controlled front group for big corporations.

We’ve got amazing momentum for the campaign already: from Arroyo Veterinary Hospital to Zero Gravity Marketing, over 1,000 businesses have already said they don’t need the Chamber claiming to represent them on energy and climate. But the Chamber claims it has 300,000 members. So we have 299,000 to go to catch up. We can do it — you could easily sign up ten businesses yourself in the next week.

If just 500 people commit to getting 10 businesses on board this week, we’ll blow past the 5,000 business mark in the next few days. Click here to join in.

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From Madison, Wisconsin to Washington D.C, we’ve seen how dirty corporation-funded lobby groups have been trying every trick in the book to undermine people-powered progress and climate solutions. Last month, thousands of uncovered emails revealed a plot to spy on and sabotage critics of the US Chamber of Commerce; at the helm of this campaign were three law firms closely linked to the US Chamber of Commerce.

This week several members of Congress called for an investigation into this smear campaign, which could be held up for counts of domestic spying, fraud, forgery, extortion, cyber stalking, defamation, harassment, violations of cyber law, forgery, blackmail, libel, and slander.

Not only were these acts wildly inappropriate and an invasion of privacy, they were also quite bizarre; the law firm trolled for photos of the families of Chamber critics, researching minute and irrelevant details (ex. “attends Jewish church”, “enjoys photographing children.”)

While this most recent tactic is certainly as appalling, backhanded, and undemocratic as they come, it is not an isolated incident in the US Chamber’s considerable history of deceit and foul play.

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Today, the US Chamber demonstrated yet again how it represents the interests of wealthy oil companies instead of the priorities of the American public.

In the wake of the devastating financial crisis, Congress is undertaking an effort to create a new set of rules under the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to better protect consumers and avoid future economic disasters.

One of the proposed rule changes would require extraction issuers, like oil and coal companies, to disclose “certain payments made for projects relating to the commercial development of oil, natural gas or minerals, including payments to various governments in connection with such projects.”

From the Ecuadorian Amazon to the oil fields of Nigeria, “extraction issuers” have been involved in all sorts of shady dealings, including human rights abuses, environmental disasters, and government corruption. Additional transparency would help the public understand the true cost of our ongoing addiction to oil and reign in the corporate abuses of wealthy fossil fuel companies.

So why is the US Chamber, which claims to represent the “interests of more than 3 million businesses” (they added that “interests of” after Mother Jones exposed them as falsely claiming to actually represent those businesses), deploying their lobbyists to fight the new rules?

As the saying goes, “Follow the money.” 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 16 companies, each of which gave more than a million dollars. It doesn’t have to say which companies, but the Chamber’s consistent, virulent opposition to rules like the ones for extraction industries make it pretty clear.

Karen Harbert, head of the Chamber’s energy front group, the Orwellian sounding Institute for 21st Century Energy, issued the following statement today: “Given the hostile environment for exploration here at home, which has driven companies out of the U.S. and into overseas markets, one must begin to wonder exactly where American companies are supposed to turn to obtain the oil and gas that we currently rely on for more than 95% of our transportation fuel.”

The answer, of course, is that we can’t continue to rely on oil and gas to power our economy. Every President since Richard Nixon has declared the need to end our addiction to oil, but thanks to the dirty lobbying of wealthy corporate front groups like the Chamber of Commerce we’re still addicted. And until we show that groups like the Chamber are the true threat to our energy security, we’re going to remain victim to the price hikes (and carbon emissions) that come with that addiction.

Thankfully, America is ready for change. In the last week, over 1,000 businesses have stood up and said “The US Chamber Doesn’t Speak for Me.” Let’s go out and get the next 1,000 to help build this growing wave!

350.org founder Bill McKibben has a piece in the Washington Post this morning about his life as a “communist.” Take a look below.

Say this for Glenn Beck, he works fast. Less than 48 hours after we launched our campaign to let businesses say that the US Chamber of Commerce didn’t represent them, Beck hit back. A true friend of Chamber (here’s a picture of him, broadcasting from their roof; certainly worth the $10,000 he donated from his $32 million earnings), he put little old 350.org up on his board Friday night next to a hammer and sickle. We were part of a communistic conspiracy that also included the Apollo Alliance, not to mention the Service Employees International Union.

In some sense, I guess, this pleased us. Right back to J. Edgar Hoover and his attacks on Martin Luther King, ‘communist’ has always been the epithet of choice for any organizers who’ve shown signs of being effective. (The Tea Party is obviously chagrined that actual working people in Wisconsin are upstaging them). In some other way, it’s just sad: confronted with the hard choices posed by physics and chemistry, Beck (like too many others) tries to figure out some spectral ghost to blame. But it didn’t seem worth getting mad–better, perhaps, to point out that there’s something…funny about Beck.

Hence this little essay, in this morning’s WaPo:

My life as a communist
By Bill McKibben

My life as a communist actually began without me knowing it, on Friday evening, when Glenn Beck spent his program explaining about a “communistic” conspiracy that included 10 groups in America. One was 350.org, a global campaign to fight climate change that I helped found three years ago. He even put our logo up on his whiteboard – and next to it a hammer and sickle.

Since I don’t actually watch Mr. Beck, I didn’t know about it until e-mails began to arrive, informing me that indeed I was a communist. My first reaction was: I’m not a communist. I’m a Methodist.

But then I reconsidered. What exactly was I doing when those e-mails arrived? I was downloading an iPad app, At Bat 11, which lets me (for only $14.99) hear the broadcast of any baseball game anywhere in the country. Since I live in New England, I use it to track our beloved Boston squad, whose moniker I had never before deeply contemplated. Now—well, enough said.

And the next morning, on my first full day as a communist? I spent most of it outdoors, at the annual New England festival for young cross-country ski racers. More than 500 kids from across the region were competing, and I was standing on the toughest hill cheering. And here’s the thing – at least with the first- and second-graders, I was cheering for everyone equally. Not only that, but did you know where this particular type of skiing was invented? Norway.

Some people laugh at Mr. Beck – earlier in the same week, for instance, he’d ventured the opinion that “Reformed Judaism” was pretty much the same as Islamic extremism. Not 100 percent correct, but the next day he apologized, and explained the research technique that that had led to the slight miss: “I had, was having a conversation with a few friends the night before—one of them, I trust on things like this, and I’m not even sure if I misunderstood him, or misheard him, or what.” In my case, though, the evidence seemed fairly damning.

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