Is that all?
Actually, no, it isn't:
"An additional $144 million of Chamber spending went for lobbying last year, more than five times that of the second-largest spender, Exxon Mobil Corp. That spending isn't affected by the court ruling or proposed legislation. . . . Disclosing that ads were funded by a particular corporation would diminish their effectiveness, said Heather Gerken, a law professor at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. 'Corporations may be the one institution less popular than Congress,' Gerken said. 'Those well-funded campaigns may be far less popular if the people know who's funding them.' . . . The Chamber weighed in this year during the Massachusetts special election that sent Republican Scott Brown to the Senate to replace the late Edward M. Kennedy, breaking the Democrats' filibuster-proof majority. The business group spent $1 million urging voters to 'call Scott Brown and thank him for supporting a plan to fix our economy.' 'Election after election has proven that the Chamber is the big dog,' said Mike Gehrke, a spokesman for the Washington- based union federation Change to Win, which supports disclosing contributors. 'People who are worried about corporate influence in elections need to be worried about the Chamber.'"
Those worried about the safety of coal miners, too, need to be worried about the U.S. Chamber, which has spent hundreds of millions to fight any regulation of its dues paying members and any regulation of pollution caused by those members, including U.S. Chamber board member and Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship. Here's In These Times:
"One of the country's worst corporate outlaws is Don Blankenship, CEO of the Virginia-based Massey Energy Corporation, which owns the Upper Big Branch coal mine in West Virginia where
2529 miners met their deaths yesterday after an explosion collapsed the mine's roof. . . . With Massey Energy growing in wealth and political power, Blankenship has been able to far outspend the organizations and candidates--both political and judicial--who might stand up against his ruthless policy of pillage and plunder. When Blankenship became infuriated with all the safety, environmental, and labor-law violations with which Massey was being hit, he took action. He used his wealth to essentially buy two State Supreme Court seats in West Virginia, where many of Massey's mine operations are located."He was unfazed by a firestorm of public criticism over his spending millions to buy sleazy, deceptive ads that clearly drowned West Virginia democracy with his dollars. Blankenship's $2.5 million worth of TV ads in 2004 falsely accused the court's chief justice of freeing a child molester--cynically hiding the CEO's real agenda of getting a pliable court on environmental violations and other corporate concerns--and replaced him with a reliable friend of business.
"Nor was Blankenship disturbed much when a U.S. Supreme Court majority ruled that one of his paid-for State Supreme Court justices couldn't participate in a case involving Massey because of the flagrant conflict of interest. (But the court's recent Citizens United case gives him power to engage in unlimited campaign spending on ads attacking his enemies.)"
And the New York Times:
"In a state where candidates who win typically spend less than $20,000, Mr. Blankenship has poured more than $6 million into political initiatives and local races over the past three years. . . . 'Don Blankenship would actually be less powerful if he were in elected office,' said United States Representative Nick J. Rahall II, a Democrat whose district includes a majority of Massey's coal mines. 'He would be twice as accountable and half as feared.'"
At StopTheChamber.com we think Blankenship resigning (as Massey investors want) would fail to deter the same behavior by other robber barons who choose to treat criminal fines as the cost of doing business. While the laws restraining corporatocracy grow ever weaker, they do need to be enforced if there is to be any point in strengthening them. Blankenship should be prosecuted for homicide.
StopTheChamber.com, a coalition of NGOs dedicated to corporate and government accountability, has been warning for months about the devastating effect of U.S. Chamber of Commerce policies on the well being of Americans. "The convergence of the Chamber's policies against regulation of workplace safety and the disaster of mining coal without regard for the environmental impact resulted in the death of 29 hard working West Virginian miners," said attorney and StopTheChamber.com spokesman Kevin Zeese. "This was not an accident, but rather the result of deliberate and intentional decisions and actions of Don Blankenship, a director of the United States Chamber of Commerce. Mr. Blankenship and Chamber CEO Tom Donohue must be held accountable for these deaths. What is it going to take for Congress and the President to stop coddling criminals, masquerading as legitimate businessmen, who cause the deaths of our loved ones? Blankenship, with the lobbying army of the Chamber to back him up, has thumbed his nose at the Mine Safety and Health Administration, ignoring or appealing every violation, including the scores that resulted in coal mine evacuations and the hundreds of other serious violations. As the Washington Post pointed out in a Saturday editorial, these 29 deaths would not have occurred absent this intentional conduct of Blankenship. He is just as criminally culpable as any mass murderer."
The Charleston, W.Va., Gazette, has also concluded that the deaths would not have occurred without the political abuses and endless safety violations and legal appeals by Massey.
StopTheChamber.com has called for the immediate arrest of Don Blankenship for homicide, and a complete criminal investigation of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and its CEO Tom Donohue to determine what policies and practices led to the deaths of these miners, whether Chamber lobbyists and lawyers were used to cover-up or avoid compliance with safety regulations, whether Massey Energy, the Chamber and others conspired to create the conditions that caused the deaths, and whether the Chamber is being used to pressure those in various political branches to stop a criminal investigation. StopTheChamber.com also called on all congress members to immediately issue a standing order to their staff to cease all communication and contact with U.S. Chamber of Commerce lobbyists.
And there's another crime Massey is guilty of. He's personally met with workers to threaten to fire them if they voted to join a labor union. And had those 29 workers belonged to a union, they could have refused unsafe work while keeping their jobs. You won't hear about the union factor in the media, except as a supposedly coequal source of political corruption with corporations. Unions just don't have the corporate media, or money, or what pass for "laws" on their side.
And who does? Why Citizens United, of course. They have an unconstitutional Supreme Court ruling with their name on it, and they're out raising money with what my friend Steve Cobble calls "their usual fiction-based fear-mongering." This involves recorded phone calls from Dick Morris, "a particularly sleazy and manipulative political adviser, who has advised both Jesse Helms and Bill Clinton, and who hates Hillary Clinton now."
Not so far away from New Mexico, where Dick Morris now sucks on telephones instead of toes, lies Nevada, where the latest beneficiary of corporate spending is none other than the man who will likely permit a filibuster to maintain a corporate Supreme Court, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. Let me close with this presumably made-up yet plausible glass-half-full lesson to all of us:
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