Chamber of Commerce Launches $100 Million Campaign to Protect Wall Street's Power at Our Expense

By Zach Carter, AlterNet

Perhaps the greatest public deception surrounding today's financial meltdown is the notion that it is unique -- a once-in-a-lifetime crisis that reflects bad luck rather than any fundamental problem with the U.S. banking system's sway in global politics.

The truth is that throughout the 1980s, the major money center banks were in much the same situation they find themselves in today.

But the U.S. Chamber of Commerce plans to spend $100 million on a lobbying push to tell you the otherwise. It's a very careful strategy designed to ensure that Wall Street maintains the power to hijack the economy and demand epic bailouts from ordinary citizens as a reward for its own greed.

The name may sound like a coalition of your friendly neighborhood small-business proprietors, but in truth, the CoC is the world's most powerful lobbying machine for the corporate executive class.

Between 1998 and 2009, the CoC's campaign contributions dwarfed those of every other interest group in the United States -- over $447 million, more than double the next closest political influence peddler, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. If you add up the total contributions of Exxon Mobil, tobacco giant Altria (formerly known as Philip Morris) and GE, you won't even get close to what the CoC spends on congressional favors.

"The Chamber," as the group ominously refers to itself, opposes key issues like universal health care, expanded unionization, efforts to curb global warming and even pay restrictions for the CEOs of bailed-out banks. Their new lobby assault is an attack on regulation and any other attempt to control the economic wrecking crew in the U.S. banking sector.

"Our biggest worry is the issue with the Congress and then the follow-on regulations," CoC President and CEO Thomas Donohue said in a recent Fox News interview. "We supported the TARP funds, we supported issues to clear up the issues on General Motors, because this is a most extraordinary time. But now it is a moment to say 'OK, we've gone there, let's stop.' " More...

There really is a "vast right wing conspiracy". It began in the early 1970s, to a great degree, with the Powell Manifesto, written at the behest of the national C of C.

Dude, did you forget to put your tin foil hat on again this morning?

Seconded. Let's stop spending. Let's not grow government anymore than it is now.

On the local level all the chamber ever does is try to help it's members survive with no agenda. How surprised they must be should they read this drivel that they have become your public enemy number one overnight.

What is next? Cub Scouts march for Neo-Nazi's?

Anyway, that is one blogger's interpretation. It has to be spot on.

I echo the tin foil statement.

If I understand it correctly, our local chamber is not a member of the national chamber. I don't get how that would work but that's what I've been told.