Stop The Chamber
The Chamber of Commerce, under the leadership of Tom Donohue, has gone from a well respected trade organization to an extremist political organization dedicated to corrupting American democracy by elevating the profits of big corporations over the well being of the citizens they serve. Recent examples of this corrupt behavior is the Chamber's spending of more than $100 million to defeat initiatives to protect the environment and provide affordable health care to everyone, and its massive attacks on democracy through the use of secret money in the 2010 election.
The Chamber is the biggest lobbying operation in the United States, spending billions of dollars on behalf of big business over the past decade to corrupt the political system. Polluters like Big Coal, Big Asbestos, and Big Oil only need call the Chamber to stop any accountability for their toxic destruction. Wall Street banks and CEOs need only make sure that they have paid their Chamber dues to ensure that they can continue to rip off the taxpayers. And killers like Big Tobacco need only form a partnership with the Chamber to ensure that they will be given immunity from lawsuits that seek accountability for the death and sickness of millions of Americans.
Tom Donohue has turned the once respected and even-handed Chamber into an extremist organization, bragging that the Chamber gutted the Clinton tobacco settlement, killed the Clinton health care plan, and scuttled previous oversight of Wall Street and the banking system. Now the Chamber is spending tens of millions on ads and lobbyists to repeal health care for all, protect polluters from accountability, and shield the financial industry from government regulation.
Sign on to Stop The Chamber
Sign On To This Campaign. Sign on to this campaign and your name will be added to the thousands who have complained about the conduct of the Chamber. We will send this letter letter to all the members of the Chamber board and others asking that they quit and condemn the Chamber.
Sign on to the campaign here
Republic Report: Corporate Lobbying Group Asks Supreme Court Not To Use “Empirical Evidence” Of Corruption When Reconsidering Citizens United
-By Lee Fang
May 22, 2012- Late last year, the Montana high court, citing the state’s long history of corporate money corrupting politics, defied the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision and continued enforcing the state’s 100-year old law banning corporate involvement in state elections. The Supreme Court has blocked the Montana court’s decision pending on its own determination as to whether to formally hear the case this fall. Allowing a full argument in matter could allow the Court to reconsider the merits of the Citizens United decision, which opened the doors to unlimited corporate and union involvement in American elections.
Huffington Post: Koch Brothers, Chamber of Commerce Face Possible Campaign Donation Disclosure After Ruling
-By Paul Blumenthal
March 31, 2012- WASHINGTON -- On Friday evening, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia issued a ruling that could begin the process of revealing the identities of secret donors to groups connected to Karl Rove and the Koch brothers.
The court ruled in Van Hollen v. Federal Election Commission that the FEC rules that restricted campaign donor disclosure are not valid and must be changed to provide for disclosure.
"We are very happy to see the judge got it right," says Paul Ryan, a lawyer for the Campaign Legal Center, a campaign finance watchdog that was a part of the team challenging the FEC rules.
Those rules state that donors to groups spending money on "electioneering communications," or advertisements that do not specifically call to elect or defeat a candidate, must only be disclosed if they specifically earmarked their donation to that particular expenditure. Since few, if any, donors to these groups ever earmark their donation for a specific election expense there was no disclosure.
Bloomberg: Campaign Donor Advertising Rule Invalidated by U.S. Judge
-By Tom Schoenberg and Jonathan D. Salant
March 31, 2012- The U.S. Federal Election Commission overstepped its authority by allowing groups that give money for election advertising to withhold the names of their donors from the public, a federal judge ruled.
U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jacksonin Washington yesterday threw out FEC regulations adopted in 2007 that let organizations and nonprofit groups keep secret the names of donors who pay for pre-election ads. She said the regulations clashed with requirements of the 2002 campaign finance law known as McCain-Feingold that groups report their ad spending to the commission.
“When the agency determined in this instance that the statute should be revised in light of legal developments, it undertook a legislative, policy making function that was beyond the scope of its authority,” Jackson said in her 31-page ruling.
Democratic Representative Chris Van Hollen of Maryland sued the FEC last year, arguing that McCain-Feingold requires full disclosure of funders who contribute $1,000 or more for so- called electioneering communications. Those messages are broadcast or cable ads identifying a federal candidate within 30 days of a primary or 60 days of the general election.
Huffington Post: Disclose Act's Latest Incarnation Would Force Vote On Secret Political Slush Funds
-By Dan Froomkin
March 21, 2012- WASHINGTON -- Senate Democrats are setting up a showdown with Republicans on the issue of unlimited secret campaign donations, proposing new rules that would expose those donations to public view.
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) on Wednesday introduced a stripped-down version of the 2010 Disclose Act, without any of the more controversial elements that Republicans cited in torpedoing the bill last time.
The new bill, which has 34 co-sponsors (all Democrats), would simply require all groups spending more than $10,000 on election-related advertising to publicly name all donors who gave $10,000 or more. To address the lack of real-time disclosure of who is paying what, the bill would require any broadcast ad to list the sponsoring group's top five funders.
The Supreme Court's 2010 Citizens United decision, which blew away limits on political contributions to independent groups, actually endorsed full disclosure. But in its wake, political operatives have seized upon nonprofit 501(c)(4) and 501(c)(6) organizations as a way of letting donors remain anonymous, turning what are supposed to be "social welfare" or trade groups into secret political slush funds.
