What's become clear is that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, an organization formed in 1912, more than a century after the first local chamber came into being, is anything but a benign umbrella for American small businesses. Quite the opposite: it's a hard-edged ideological shop. It was Glenn Beck, after all, who said of the chamber that "they are us," and urged his viewers to send them money. (Beck personally contributed $10,000 of the $32 million he earned in 2009.) The chamber's chief lobbyist even called in to offer his personal thanks. It shouldn't have come as a great surprise: Beck's Fox News parent, Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, had given its own million-dollar donation to the chamber.
Thanks to the Supreme Court and its Citizens United decision, there's no way to keep the chamber and others from running their shadowy election-time campaigns. As long as monster companies are pumping money into their coffers, it's "free speech" all the way and they'll simply keep on with their dodgy operations.
Still, the rest of us can stand up and be counted. We can tell the Congressional representatives taking their money that they don't speak for us. We can urge more big companies to act like Apple and Microsoft, which publicly denounced the chamber. (It's good to hear Levi Strauss, General Electric, and Best Buy making similar noises.) We need to hear from more dissenting chambers of commerce. It cheered me to find that the CEO of the Greater New York Chamber said, "They don't represent me," or to discover that just a few weeks ago the Seattle chamber cut its ties.
But it's even more important to hear from small businesspeople, the very contingent the U.S. Chamber of Commerce draws on for its credibility. Across America in the coming months, volunteers from the climate change organization I helped to found, 350.org, will be fanning out to canvass local businesses -- all those bakeries and beauty salons, colleges and chiropractors, pharmacies and fitness centers that belong to local chambers of commerce.
The volunteers will be asking for signatures on a statement announcing that "the U.S. Chamber doesn't speak for me," and offering businesspeople the chance to post videos expressing just how differently they do think when it comes to global warming, energy, and the environment. It's a chance to emphasize that American business should be about nimbleness, creativity, and adaptation -- that it's prepared to cope with changing circumstances, instead of using political cash to ensure that yesterday's technologies remain on artificial life support.
It's easy to guess how the U.S. Chamber of Commerce will respond to this campaign. Last week, a series of leaks showed that their law firm had been carrying out extended negotiations with at least one "security firm" to collect intelligence on the chamber's adversaries, including the group that uncovered the tax data showing where their money came from. Once the leak was made public, the chamber's law firm cut off the negotiations, but not before they received "samples" of the kind of intelligence they presumably wanted -- pictures of their opponents' children, for instance, or the news that one foe attended a "Jewish church" near Washington.
For the record: I don't like the chamber's deceptions. I belong to the Methodist church in my hometown. Keep away from my daughter.
With my colleagues at 350.org, I'll do what I can to help undermine the chamber's claim to represent American business. I don't know if we can win this fight against money pollution, but we're going to do what we can to clear the air.
Bill McKibben is Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College, co-founder of 350.org, and a TomDispatch regular. His most recent book is Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet.
Copyright 2011 Bill McKibben
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