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
NBC News: NPS Ultimatum to Occupy DC: No More Camping
Park Service says crackdown starts Monday
After four months in McPherson Park, the National Park Service says the camp-out is over.
On Friday, the Park Service began distributing flyers to demonstrators in Freedom Plaza and McPherson Square advising them to pack up their sleeping bags and remove their camping gear from the park by Monday at noon or face arrest.
The flyer reads:
Huffington Post: Chamber of Commerce Sends Internal Email Reassessing SOPA, Protect IP
-By Zach Carter
January 21, 2012- WASHINGTON -- The top intellectual property lawyer at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce appears to have sent out an email to underlings on Friday, notifying the world's most powerful corporate lobbyists that their organization is reassessing controversial anti-piracy legislation in the face of bipartisan congressional setbacks.
On Friday, both Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas) said they would suspend votes on the bills indefinitely. The Stop Online Piracy Act, and its counterpart in the Senate, the Protect IP Act, had longstanding support from Hollywood and other content industry stalwarts, which were seeking new tools to crack down on internet copyright violations. The bills were vehemently opposed by Internet experts, free speech advocates and tech companies like Google and Yahoo, who warned that the legislation threatened the functionality of the Internet and contained widespread First Amendment abuses.
Think Progress: Chamber Of Commerce Drops Call For Health Care Repeal From Annual Policy Address
-By Igor Volsky
January 13, 2012- Tom Donohue signaled that the powerful U.S. Chamber of Commerce may be softening its attacks against President Obama’s signature accomplishments like the Affordable Care Act and the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Kevin Hall reports that Donohue is pledging a “wait-and-see approach” towards the new agency and has not decided if the organization will challenge the recess appointment of Richard Cordray as its director.
During his annual State of the Business address yesterday, Donohue also adopted a more moderate tone towards health care reform. “The health care law established 159 new agencies, panels, commissions, and regulatory bodies,” Donohue said, but did not echo his 2011 call for repealing the law in its entirety. Consider the contrast:
ABC News: Chamber Promises to Meddle in Elizabeth Warren’s Senate Race
-By Matt Negrin
January 12, 2012- The free-enterprise advocates at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce say they’ll be spending lots of time trying to influence the Senate race in Massachusetts involving Elizabeth Warren, the hero of the left who is responsible for creating the consumer protection bureau that has been demonized by Republicans.
The chamber is careful not to give too many details of its plans for the Senate seat once held by the late Ted Kennedy, and now occupied by Republican Scott Brown. But two chamber leaders suggested to reporters this morning that their influence in the Bay State will be quite noticeable.
“We’ll be significantly involved,” said Tom Donohue, the president and CEO of the Chamber of Commerce.
Bruce Josten, an executive vice president, said, “We were interested there. We were involved in that last cycle. We intend and will be involved in that race this cycle.”
Al-Jazeera: Buying Congress in 2012
It is time to stand up against the corporate takeover of American governmental institutions, says the author.
-By Bill McKibben
January 12, 2012- Middlebury, Vermont - My resolution for 2012 is to be naive - dangerously naive.
I'm aware that the usual recipe for political effectiveness is just the opposite: to be cynical, calculating, an insider. But if you think, as I do, that we need deep change in this country, then cynicism is a sucker's bet. Try as hard as you can, you're never going to be as cynical as the corporations and the harem of politicians they pay for. It’s like trying to outchant a Buddhist monastery.
Huffington Post: Elizabeth Warren Leaves Voicemail For Scott Brown, Asking For Third Party Détente
-By Sam Stein
January 13, 2012- One day after the U.S. Chamber of Commerce pledged to be "significantly involved" in the Massachusetts Senate race, Democrat Elizabeth Warren is urging her opponent in that contest, Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass.), to join her in keeping outside groups away.
The consumer advocate and Harvard professor called the man she's trying to unseat on Friday to ask him to enter into an "enforceable agreement" that would limit the meddling of third-party groups like the Chamber. A campaign aide said that Brown did not answer the phone, so Warren left a voicemail.
"The gist was, "I'm serious about this. I'm going to pick up the phone and get this done," the aide said.
Earlier in the afternoon, Warren wrote Brown a letter, laying out the objective of her plan.
Wall St Journal: China Hackers Hit U.S. Chamber
Attacks Breached Computer System of Business-Lobbying Group; Emails Stolen.
-By Siobhan Gorman
December 21, 2011- A group of hackers in China breached the computer defenses of America's top business-lobbying group and gained access to everything stored on its systems, including information about its three million members, according to several people familiar with the matter.
The break-in at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is one of the boldest known infiltrations in what has become a regular confrontation between U.S. companies and Chinese hackers. The complex operation, which involved at least 300 Internet addresses, was discovered and quietly shut down in May 2010.
It isn't clear how much of the compromised data was viewed by the hackers. Chamber officials say internal investigators found evidence that hackers had focused on four Chamber employees who worked on Asia policy, and that six weeks of their email had been stolen.
It is possible the hackers had access to the network for more than a year before the breach was uncovered, according to two people familiar with the Chamber's internal investigation.
