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

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Usually, the best ideas come from people in our great 350 network. Here’s one of them:

An organizer recently told us that we needed a simple way to explain our chamber campaign in 30 seconds or less. She was right, so we got to work. We compiled the need-to-know info about the US chamber, and let our graphic designer Matthew go wild. And he made this info-graphic.

But it’s not just a poster–we’ve got a plan to go with it…

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Check out this sweet new video featuring local business owners declaring “The US Chamber of Commerce Doesn’t Speak for Me.”

Are you a local business owner or chamber? Send us your stories, videos, and photos as chamber@350.org.

Last month with the flood of “Chamberleaks” emails, we saw just how dirty protectors of the Chamber image are willing to play: spying on family members of Chamber critics, planting false documents, creating fake personas. Last week brought news of the latest wave of slander and cyber stalking, this time aimed at Chamber-critics, Service Employees Union International (SEIU.) Hunton and Williams, the law firm ensnared in the Chamber “dirty tricks” campaign that sought to sabotage critics of the Chamber, is now working for  Sodexo Inc., the commercial food services conglomerate long criticized for its unjust labor practices.

The US Chamber and Sodexo are both clients of Hunton and Williams, and both are united in their drive to undermine fair labor practices and small business interests.

Triple Pundit, “an innovative new-media company for the business community,” featured The Us Chamber Doesn’t Speak for Me campaign in an article on their website. It’s great to see the campaign spreading so quickly, especially in influential business outlets like Triple Pundit. Enjoy the article below or click here to read it on the Triple Pundit site.

US Chamber of Commerce: Shoot the Messenger Whatever the Cost
by RP Siegel

Bill McKibben wrote a piece last week in which he looks past the Koch brothers, who are finally getting the scrutiny they deserve, to the number one enemy of climate action: the US Chamber of Commerce. According to McKibben, the US C. of C. “spent more money lobbying in 2009 than the next five biggest players combined; they spent more money on politics than either the Republican or Democratic National Committees.”

And while they claim to represent 3 million businesses, the majority of their funding comes from just 16 companies. Given the fact that the Chamber has been expending so much effort attempting to thwart any attempt to control carbon emissions, it’s not hard to guess who has been filling the Chamber’s pot.
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Efforts to gut the Clean Air Act continued in the Senate today with barbs being traded back and forth between Senators on either side of the issue. Theatrical Senate hearings, however, can obscure the real dramatic players in this tragedy/farce. As important as individual Senators are to the fight, the real villain is none other than — you guessed it — the US Chamber of Commerce.

As it turns out, the US Chamber has fought clean air regulations for decades. To dig into the history of US Chamber opposition to clean air, our lungs, and a healthy environment, we're turning to a great 2008 blog post from Frank O'Donnell at Campaign for America's Future. Read on for more info and then make sure to head over to our friends at 1Sky to join up in the fight to protect the Clean Air Act and all that depends on it.

Now, on to the Chamber of Commerce. You may have heard of its most recent scare campaign about greenhouse gases. In an effort to frighten Congress into taking away Environmental Protection Agency authority over greenhouse gases (in other words, to reverse the big Supreme Court decision) the Chamber has been running about contending the EPA could soon be cracking down on churches, donut shops and melon farms!

When it comes to clean-air controls, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce always seems to favor hysteria over fact. Its current campaign should be dismissed as just one most scare tactic aimed at keeping those membership dues rolling in.

How credible are these dire predictions? Is the donut really about to become an endangered species? Perhaps here is where history should be our guide.

For the Chamber has a proud legacy of hyperbole, hysteria – and downright inaccuracy – when it comes to clean air requirements. In fact, the Chamber has been waging rhetorical war against the Clean Air Act for almost four decades. A couple of examples perhaps should suffice to enable us to evaluate the current scare campaign.

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Our team here at 350.org has been watching in horror as the tragic events continue in Japan. Just as the devastation of the earthquake and tsunami begins to fully reveal itself (the death toll is likely to climb above 10,000), a new threat is quickly escalating: a nuclear disaster.

An explosion at the Fukushima Daiichi’s reactor 3 on Monday:

The dangers of nuclear power have been hotly debated for years. We think an honest debate is necessary to look at the costs and risks of nuclear power, especially in regards to other clean alternatives, such as wind and solar. But that sort of debate is impossible when the nuclear power industry and its allies, like the US Chamber of Commerce, spend millions of dollars to try and push forward new nuclear projects without  proper review.

In their new report, Project No Project, the US Chamber lists 23 different nuclear power plants it would like to see construction begin on. In each case, rate payers, public health advocates, environmentalists, or community groups are standing up to oppose the plants. The US Chamber likes to portray this as “extreme behavior,” but often times it’s just plain common sense.

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Many thanks to our friends at Greenbiz.com who debuted 350.org founder Bill McKibben’s latest piece on the US Chamber of Commerce. Greenbiz is the premier news site and network for green businesses and industries across America and around the world. It’s a great community for us to be reaching with this campaign. We’re looking forward to many new sign ups as businesses across America continue to say, “The US Chamber Doesn’t Speak for Me!”

Who Really Speaks for American Business?
By Bill McKibben

Among other truths made completely clear by the showdown in Wisconsin: the outsized role of the Koch brothers in American politics.

Charles and David, the third and fourth richest men in America, first gained notoriety in the fall, when a remarkable expose by Jane Mayer in the New Yorker showed how they’d funded not only the Tea Party but also the hydra-headed campaign to undermine the science of global warming, all in the service of even more profit for their oil and gas business.

But it was in Wisconsin that the down-and-dirty details of their operation began to emerge — they’d not only funded the election campaigns of the governor and the new GOP legislature, but also an advertising effort attacking the state’s teachers. They’d helped pay for buses to ferry in counterprotesters. We were even treated to the sight of new Governor Scott Walker fawning over them in what turned out to be a hoax phone call. The Kochs are right up there now with the great plutocrats of American history, a 21st century version of the robber barons.

The trouble is, they don’t care. And they don’t really have to care. Their business is privately held and answers to no one. Last week their spokesman said they would “not step back at all …This is a big part of our life’s work. We are not going to stop.” So those of us who care about things like the climate will need to go on tracking them. But we’ll also need to pay attention to their ideological twin, the Pepsi to their Koch. It’s the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Recent piece from environmental writer Ben Proffer at Change.org. Ben shares the story of his parents, “proud  business owners since 1978”, and talks about the real meaning of entrepreneurship and business sense. Cross-posted from Change.org.

Already, in the few weeks since the campaign launch, more than 1,000 small businesses have stood up to the Chamber. So have 31 local chamber of commerce divisions.

One of those businesses belongs to my own parents, who have been proud business owners since 1978.

Proffer Productions has created cutting-edge communications for over thirty years. As my mother recalls, “The business was started in February of 1978, which was four months after Don and I got married. Don started the business in the upstairs of our house.” My dad had been working for a recording studio in Kansas City, MO and was presented with the opportunity to put on a trade show in La Jolla, CA on his own.

Read the full story at Change.org

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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