16 October 2009

We Are Financing the Chamber of Commerce to Work Against Us

Read this article to see why I once thought that Elliot Spitzer would be - and should be - our president in the next decade:

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce must be stopped. Here's how to do it.

The intro ...

The U.S. Chamber
of Commerce
—the self-proclaimed voice of business in Washington—has been
wrong on virtually every major public-policy issue of the past decade: financial
deregulation, tax and fiscal policy, global warming and environmental
enforcement, consumer protection, health care reform …

The chamber remains an unabashed voice for the libertarian worldview
that caused the most catastrophic economic meltdown since the Great Depression.
And the chamber's view of social justice would warm Scrooge's heart. It is the
chamber's right to be wrong, and its right to argue its preposterous ideas
aggressively, as it does through vast expenditures on lobbyists and litigation.
Last year alone, the chamber spent more than $91 million on lobbying, and,
according to lobby tracker Opensecrets.org, it has spent more than twice as much on lobbying during the past 12 years as any
other corporation or group.

The problem is, the chamber is doing all this with our money. The chamber
survives financially on the dues and support of its members, which are most of
America's major corporations listed on the stock exchange. ..

How, you might ask, do we own these companies? Public pension funds and
mutual funds are the largest owners of equities in the market. They are the
institutional shareholders that have the capacity to push management—and the
boards of the corporations. Yet the mutual funds and pension funds have failed
to do so.

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