No, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce doesn't OWN the federal gov't. It's more like a time-share deal

President and CEO Thomas J. Donohue: master of the hardest-core opposition on health care and financial reform, and master of the money-raising "ask" -- wouldn't you give this man a million dollars?

"In 2009 the Chamber doled out somewhere in the area of $120 million on lobbying alone, five times what its nearest cohort, Exxon Mobil, spent. Much of that money went to an advertising and grassroots blitz attacking the congressional health care legislation, making the Chamber very likely the biggest spender in the debate."

-- from James Verini's "Show Him the Money," in Washington Monthly

by Ken

As I note periodically, I'm a sucker for "nuts 'n' bolts" stories -- the kind that give us a glimpse into the inner workings of our crazy world, focusing on the details that tell us who exactly is doing what and how they're doing it, often including how the bastards are getting away with it. So I devoured this Washington Monthly piece by James Verini about the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and its proprietor, I mean president and CEO, Thomas J. "I Need a Million Dollars" Donohue.

Just to complete the thought begun above:

In the weeks leading up to health care's passage in March, it was spending $800,000 a day trying to defeat the Democratic legislation. Livid that the law went through, the Chamber has now pledged to funnel $50 million -- more than twice as much as the entire cash holdings of the Republican National Committee and the National Republican Congressional Committee put together (as of late May) -- into an estimated forty House races and ten Senate races this fall. About eight of every ten dollars of Chamber political donations go to Republicans.

Then the author says something that surprises me: "With such torrents of Chamber money raining down on the political process, it's rather ironic that many Americans believe the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to be part of the government. " Did you or anyone you know ever think of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce as part of the government? I can't remember ever thinking that. However, I can remember thinking, and possibly still tend to think, that it's some sort of glorified civic booster outfit. Oh sure, pro-business, but concerned with the general welfare, albeit from that pro-business mindset.

Uh-uh. Verini finds the erroneous belief that the Chamber is part of the government "fitting," because --

With its legions of lobbyists, policy analysts, economists, and attorneys, its own rapid-response media center and law firm, its hundreds of international chapters and steady stream of officials, legislators, and foreign potentates flowing through its immense bronze-relief doors on H Street, the Chamber does act like a federal agency -- or like a third political party on permanent campaign. "The Chamber views itself as a shadow-government policymaking body," a former Chamber economist, Lawrence Hunter, said.

All that infrastructure, Verini notes, has in recent years been aimed rather singlemindedly at the policies of the Obama administration, which we lefties may think of as about as pro-business as an administration can get, but which the Businessmen's Businessman, Chairman Donohue, regards as a dagger aimed squarely at the heart of American capitalism. Not surprisingly, given the absolutism of the Chamber's official positions, its "success" rate against the administration doesn't look great. Verini cites the health care package adopted, and the Senate-passed financial reform bill, and the awkwardness of its anti-environmental-legislation position requiring it to question "the exigency, even the existence, of climate change."

But of course the health care package could hardly be much industry-friendlier, and while there are prospects for some useful elements in an ultimate financial reform package, the opposition has surely succeeded in neutering vast and crucial chunks of it. If these are the worst "failures" the Chamber has suffered, it seems to me they're doing alarmingly well.

Besides, as Verini points out,

under the curious rules of Washington lobbying, losses can be as good as wins. "The worst thing to happen to Tom is to have an issue resolved, even to his own favor, because then he can't raise any more funds on it," says John Schulz, a former editor at the trade journal Traffic World, who's covered Donohue for twenty-five years. "There's nothing he can't make a dollar on."

And don't kid yourself about the stakes Chairman Donohue is playing for. Here's how Verini opens his piece:

Thomas J. Donohue, president and CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, has a well-developed talent for self-promotion. He makes a point of being the last person on any stage, and he leaves no detail to chance. The Chamber's event staff is famously fastidious: one of Donohue's parties involved corralling a Clydesdale horse into the Chamber's lobby. Such grandiosity is of a piece with how Donohue treats his station. He travels in a chauffeured Lincoln and a leased jet, and his salary, $3.7 million last year, makes him the sixth highest paid lobbyist in the country.

This requires funding, which Donohue secures with exceptional skill. Among his office decorations is a desk plaque that reads, "SHOW ME THE MONEY." "He used to pound his fist on the desk and say, 'Show me the money!'" a former Chamber lobbyist recalls. "He got his rocks off on it."

He leads fund-raising seminars. The same lobbyist recounted what he learned. "Donohue said, first, you walk into the room with the CEO and you hit the key issues," said the lobbyist. "Then you sit in closer to them. And you make 'the ask.' You look right into their eyes and say, 'As a result of what the Chamber is doing for your industry, I need a hundred thousand dollars.' Or, 'I need a million dollars.' And then you smile and you shut your mouth. Your instinct is to start talking because you're nervous. Don't. Just smile and stare. And wait." The lobbyist, who'd been trained well by Donohue, leaned forward and stared at me as I sat listening. I became nervous. I shifted in my chair. I started laughing, then stopped. He just stared. After a long pause he leaned back and said, "I tell you, there were people in that room who pissed in their pants."

In the article we get to see Donohue close up, both in interview and in action, and let me tell you, it's not to be missed. Most of the detail really isn't terribly surprising, except perhaps in the naked effrontery of the power-grabbing and manipulation.

Even Verini is surprised when Donohue, asked "what, exactly, the Chamber does," offers "two fundamental things," the second of which -- after "we're advocates" -- is what the chairman describes as being "the reinsurance industry for individual industry associations and state chambers of commerce and people of that nature." By this what he means is that the Chamber can go where its clients, er members, can't, offering as an example the all-out, all-media war the Chamber waged against the movement for financial reform -- a take-no-prisoners campaign of vilification that the clients, er members, couldn't dare sponsor directly. Verini fills in details of the similar campaign against health care reform. As he puts it:

a large part of what the Chamber sells is political cover. For multibillion-dollar insurers, drug makers, and medical device manufacturers who are too smart and image conscious to make public attacks of their own, the Chamber of Commerce is a friend who will do the dirty work. "I want to give them all the deniability they need," says Donohue. That deniability is evidently worth a lot. According to a January article in the National Journal, six insurers alone -- Aetna, Cigna, Humana, Kaiser Foundation Health Plans, UnitedHealth Group, and Wellpoint -- pumped up to $20 million into the Chamber last year. [Emphasis added.]

Again, don't deprive yourself of Verini's wonderful reconstruction of both Donohue's and the Chamber's past, and how they became not-at-all-inevitably intertwined to form the lobbying juggernaut of today.

I do want to call attention to a fascinating point Verini raises:

Many of the Chamber's efforts are undoubtedly good for certain businesses. Wall Street would prefer to avoid further financial regulation. Oil companies would prefer to avoid further environmental regulation. Whether the Chamber -- which counts as members everyone from Goldman Sachs to British Petroleum, Microsoft to Wal-Mart, PepsiCo to General Motors, and hundreds of thousands of more obscure businesses in between -- is good for business as a whole is another matter. With unemployment, statistical and personal, on the mind of every officeholder up for reelection this year, Republicans and Democrats claim to agree on one thing: small business will be the engine of job growth after the Great Recession. But while the Chamber has as legitimate a claim to representing this sector as any organization around -- 96 percent of its members have fewer than 100 employees -- it is also beholden to a cadre of multinationals whose interests are often inimical to those of small business. In 2008, a third of its revenues came from just nineteen companies.

This sort of conflict doesn't appear to bother Donohue. One lobbyist at a trade association that shares many members with the Chamber describes Donohue's tack as "imperial." "If you don't like it, you can leave. That's their approach to members," he says. Not all members, though. If there's a consistent pattern to how the Chamber operates, it's that it follows the money. [Emphasis added.]

And in the end, again not surprisingly, the money seems to be what the operation is all about. Presumably, all of Donohue's clients, er members feel they're getting value for the money they kick in, and in, and in -- bearing in mind those formidable "ask" talents of his. But they also surely understand that their priorities are only partly the chairman's priorities. Also that the chairman's priorities are going to be heavily weighted toward who's paying for the highest consideration -- and that at his discretion the Chamber's activities can easily work against individual members' interests. And not just financial interests.

While I talked to many local chamber heads who said they rely on the Chamber's resources, I also spoke to many who are coming to resent Donohue. "Their stances have occasionally alienated local businesses," says Tim Sink, president of the Greater Concord Chamber of Commerce in New Hampshire. In Sink's region, the Chamber ran health care attack ads targeting Congressman Paul Hodes, a popular legislator with bipartisan support who's now running for Senate. "It put the local chambers in an awkward situation, I can tell you that."

Verini documents a range of complaints against the chairman, from every imaginable direction. None of it seems to concern him. And in the end, it turns out that, apart from his own personal financial interests, the chairman's overriding interest is --what else? -- his standing in the Village:

What becomes clear from observing Donohue's record is that, for all his opposition to federal oversight, he is a quintessential creature of Washington. Like the head of any bureaucracy or agency, he measures his success far less by results than by the size of his budget. That's why the Chamber's agenda hews so closely to that of its largest contributors. It's also why, even in front of dues payers such as Birmingham business leaders, Donohue is happy to trumpet how much money the Chamber is taking from them. Those funds don't need to lead to accomplishments; they are the accomplishments.

I doubt that Chairman Donohue includes that in his sales pitches, or his pep talks, or his fund-raising arm-twistings. You'd think the businessfolk on the other ends of those transactions might want to take it into consideration, though.


THE CoC IS JUST ONE REGIMENT IN THE ARMY
OF AGGRIEVED ANTI-NEW DEAL BUSINESSMEN

On the listserv on which the Washington Monthly piece on Tom Donohue and "his" U.S. Chamber of Commerce was brought to my attention, my friend Mark quickly followed up with a book recommendation. I'm almost embarrassed to say that I know such people, but I should warn you that Mark has the eccentric habit of reading books because he hopes to, you know, learn stuff, maybe even stuff that might be, you know, important. What are you gonna do with people like that? It's as if they didn't understand that our civic leaders -- including, perhaps especially, the religious ones -- in collaboration with our Infotainment News media can be counted on to tell us everything we need to know!

Mark describes Invisible Hands: The Businessmen's Crusade Against the New Dealby Kim Phillips-Fein as "pretty close to a must read in my opinion." It "spans the 1930's into the 1980's," he says, "and does a deep dive into how business leaders and resources drove political agendas." He thinks it deserves wider attention, "especially as it was published in Jan of this year and seems to have received very little notice." (He does note that Invisible Hands was the subject of a Firedoglake book chat, and he directs us to the Barnes & Noble website, which has a couple of reviews including this one from Publishers Weekly:

Looking beyond the usual roster of right-wing Christians, anticommunist neo-cons and disgruntled working-class whites, this incisive study examines the unsung role of "a political movement of businessmen" in leading America's post-1960s rightward turn. Historian Phillips-Fein traces the hidden history of the Reagan revolution to a coterie of business executives, including General Electric official and Reagan mentor Lemuel Boulware, who saw labor unions, government regulation, high taxes and welfare spending as dire threats to their profits and power. From the 1930s onward, the author argues, they provided the money, organization and fervor for a decades-long war against New Deal liberalism -- funding campaigns, think tanks, magazines and lobbying groups, and indoctrinating employees in the virtues of unfettered capitalism. Theirs was also a battle of ideas, she contends; the business vanguard nurtured conservative thinkers like economist Friedrich von Hayek and his secretive Mont Pellerin Society associates, who developed a populist free-market ideology that persuaded workers to side with their bosses against the liberal state. Combining piquant profiles of corporate firebrands with a trenchant historical analysis that puts economic conflict at the heart of political change, Phillips-Fein makes an important contribution to our understanding of American conservatism.

Under the heading of "knowing our enemy," it sounds like Invisible Hands is an important book. I've squeezed it in near the top of my reading list.

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